Im 65 and in New Zealand I had a British education..
When I started school at 5 (Primer One) I probably could already count...I know I was already reading..
We learnt “mental Arithmetic almost at once..Hey that’s having to MEMORIZE
about once a week the teacher would give us an oral quiz..
10 sums..
she would say two times three and we wrote it down and then it was on to the next problem...no time to count fingers write down the problem or anything else...we either knew the answer or we didn’t..
it was a source of pride to get all 10 answers right...and most of us did ...
We started learning the 12 times table right from the start and a chart with all 12 lots was on the wall long before we got to the end..
there is was every day to look at..
we may have been working on the 3x column but we already had experience with what the 6X etc. looked like..
so when the teacher covered the chart for a quiz the contents of the chart remained locked in our memories...
Children learn 2 ways, auditory and visual..they either learn through one of those or both...
If the children don’t have charts etc on the walls of their classrooms the info is just handed out piecemeal and they don’t get everything they need...
Later in their education they would have an occasional Math problem that does not give them enough information to form a satisfactory answer..
those problems up thread were those sort of questions...
there were viable which were not taken into consideration...
how many of those cars did have a spare ???
Did all the children have all the common amount of digits ???
Did little Mary have a broken leg and only wearing one sneaker ???
Was Jimmy in flip flops that day ???
LOL
But meanwhile how did my generation manage (and WITHOUT computers) to learn to do the times table in our heads and to accomplish other Math effortlessly, and our grandchildren with supposedly all these modern advantages cant do 2+2 without taking their sneakers off ???
We did a lot of game playing on States and Capitols that really got you in to learning them.
As my parents were ill educated, from the post depression age, and went to work well before they completed Jr HS, I had no one who could teach me those things. So learned every thing in school or in books.
I aced out history, Eng reading, grammar was the pits, math was average. I transpose numbers, and no one caught it.