“I used to teach mathematics at the university”
Did you know lots of guys in the math department who stubbornly refused to learn the multiplication tables because it was more interesting, challenging, and fun to just go through solving the problem again each time they needed to muliply two numbers?
Did you know lots of guys in the math department who stubbornly refused to learn the multiplication tables because it was more interesting, challenging, and fun to just go through solving the problem again each time they needed to muliply two numbers?No, guess what: Everybody (including me) knew the multiplication tables by heart, as well as every formula that was interesting for their particular field (even really, really big ones ;-). But absolutely nobody kept little sheets of paper full of formulæ to memorize. The only people who put any effort into memorizing formulæ were students who were hopelessly bad at mathematics and eventually dropped out. Or perhaps they learned in highschool that you can learn mathematics by memorizing formulæ…;-)
I am not saying that it is bad to know a formula (or what 5*3 is) by heart. I am saying that if you do the right kind of work, i.e., if you try to understand the stuff, then memorizing it comes automatically. Doing memorization first is a waste of time and effort.
Of course, things may be different in grade school: We would like even stupid children to be able to compute 5*3 without a calculator. So, perhaps having kids memorize the tables might be a good idea, after all. But the important thing is that the kids also have to learn to think, and what we see instead is ever more dumbing down.
But they wouldn't *DO* it *every* time. Just when they hadn't used a fact for awhile, or the first time they needed to use it. Otherwise they'd remember.
Besides math professors hardly ever need to do arithmetic.