[ear7h]

> I finally memorized them by using flash cards and a payment schedule set up by my parents.

This was my exact experience learning to the multiplication tables in 4th grade. Although my payment was watching tv or playing video games. The only one I really learned was multiplying by 8 bc my dad made more effort for me to learn it (he was programmer).

I also use random "tricks" for arithmetic, like when multiplying 6 and 7, I'll do (37)+(37) instead because I've memorized 3*7=21 and the addition is easy with no carries

[vagrantJin]

I just abhor the fact that teachers never gave students the intuition to approach problems and solve them. Not that I blame them - but my eyes watered when a visiting lecturer derived formulas we'd used in High school and told to memorize as absolute truths without knowing why. You finally get to appreciate mathematics as a discipline and a tool.

[ghaff]

One of the problems, especially but not exclusively at the high school level, is that you often haven't been exposed to the math (or other foundational information) that you need to derive things from more or less first principles. Physics is probably the most obvious example. You need Calculus to derive many of the formulae in high school physics but the average student probably hasn't had Calculus yet so they're just equations to memorize.

[Wowfunhappy]

This is why I think a lot of pre-collegiate curricula is misguided. The ultimate goal of a high school science or math course should be to teach logic and critical thinking ("learning how to learn"). If a student doesn't have the ability to understand why a formula works, we should take a hard look at why we're teaching it, even if that means radically rethinking which subjects are offered.

[ghaff]

I don't disagree.

Math is the real challenge though. When I was in business school I tutored a group of students who were... struggling. They simply lacked the ability to handle things like basic graphs in economics, solving equations, never mind the most simple differentiation to find a maxima/minima. It was a frustrating experience. I couldn't make up for a general lack of even high school math.

And read any number of books out there on first year bschool experiences and you'll find similar.

There are absolutely successful people who are in that category. But Math is a major roadblock for many people.