The likely reason your kid is taking HOURS to finish his math homework...
What if there was a treatment that, while it might make life uncomfortable for a week or so, would allow your child to complete math homework in a fraction of the time for the rest of her school career?
GOOD NEWS! THIS TREATMENT EXISTS! It’s called memorizing your times tables.
Seriously. Whenever a student’s work takes longer than it should, weak multiplication knowledge is often to blame.
Consider these examples:
Simplify 7x/63xy.
Find the greatest common factor of 72 and 80.
Solve for x when x/5 = 12.
Calculate the area of a triangle with a height of 8 and a base of 6.
What is the square root of 81?
In each of the above examples, multiplication and division are being used to do something. If the student’s times tables are automatic, each problem can be answered very quickly — some in a matter of seconds.
If the times tables are not automatic, each of these problems can take a few minutes. The student might even stall out completely, being unable to spot the relationships between the numbers and therefore discover an appropriate problem-solving strategy.
Conservatively, we’re talking 2 minutes vs. 10 minutes or more. So a student who is strong in times tables can finish this kind of work in 1/5 of the time.
To test whether your child may be struggling with multiplication, try familiar quantities in a problem. Instead of simplifying 9x(5x + 7), you’d offer something like 2x(2x + 3). If the student still doesn’t see the answer, the multiplication is not the issue — the underlying concept is not solid. But if the student is able to move to the next step quickly, it’s likely that the times tables are to blame.
Once you know that the multiplication is the problem, you can solve it. Unfortunately, we don’t expect this to be the source of difficulty for middle school and high school kids, so it never gets addressed.
The key to dealing with it is to compress a lot of effort into a short period of time (like less than a week). Flashcards, apps, flashcard apps — anything can work, if the student is on board. The promise of cutting every hour of math work down to 12 minutes (i.e., one fifth of the time!) is pretty compelling motivation.
If the tables are still not sticking after a few hours of work, then you have a deeper problem on your hands: addition. If a student struggles to add quickly and easily, that will need to be addressed first.
What do you think? Could this “treatment” solve the problem of overlong math assignments? Let me know if your child begins to find relief as a result of memorizing the times tables once and for all!