They were forced to MEMORIZE them.
I have noticed that there are quite a few people who can temporarily memorize facts about math but it's basically like pouring water in a sieve because they don't ever really have a full understanding of the concepts.
For instance someone studying for a test might be able to memorize the formula for adding fractions. But the majority will forget this after the test, whereas someone who understands what fractions mean might not even need the formula to do simple problems, and yet will also be more likely to remember it.
Didn’t everyone use to memorize the multiplication tables up to 15?
No. Perhaps you were lucky to get a school that did, but my recollection is that most schools did not require full memorization of the times tables beyond 10 x 10. What would have been really useful is if schools taught the various tricks that can be used to mentally multiply all two-digit numbers, but I doubt many of them did that either.
YOU’VE Got it!
I took math in High School. I took it in college. I retained NONE of it.
Now my daughters are working with a great math curriculum but when they don’t understand something, I don’t have the skills to teach them. We had to wait until Dad got home.
However, someone gets it. Here is a program we just bought.
We bought the Algebra 1 for my daughter. Suddenly, when she gets something wrong, this program teaches her WHAT she got wrong. I found that my problem is, I could remember the formulas, but they were abstract to me. (i.e. “Why does x=6? Why not x=7”) With this, I’m actually understanding what she is doing, right or wrong.
She got a D on a unit test. We were going to redo the unit. We went to the program and started feeding in examples. By the fifth one, she got it.
When she retook the test, she aced it!