A funny incomplete thought on dignity
It feels bad to imagine a student memorizing their times tables, right? Perhaps I feel that way because I'm a former mathematician, former mathematics teacher, and evergreen Paul Lockhart fangirl, someone who's seen the societal rot stemming from the belief that high-level mathematics is a less creative form of accountancy. But it's bigger than me. As I talked about in Pokopia: The end of history, the dominant ideology1 in pedagogy trains students to be self-sufficient, innovative, flexible, and creative. It's opposed to the idea of creating someone who's good at mindlessly applying technique. Certainly that feels like indoctrination; there's something a little "An acre is the area of a rectangle whose length is one furlough" about it[^belem].
Off the top of my head, though, I can think of two situations where students have been failed by a move away from rote memorization. The first was a student I tutored in algebra who simply did not know their times tables. They had a kindly teacher who instilled in them the importance of knowing times tables worked and all that, but who did not instill the product of 8 x 8. When I modeled solutions, the student was essentially working asynchronously, trying to figure out how I leapt from one expression to another. The second is, well, whatever's going on with phonics in the news right now. Suffice it to say, a few decades ago phonics education got poo-pooed in the culture war, and it's burning childhood literacy in a seemingly clear-cut way.
It seems like the problem is that "drilling and killing" feels undignified. That's certainly how I felt coming out of my pedagogy classes! But sometimes your intuition sucks; so it goes. If indeed the rote memorization must return there are two things to be done. One is to suck it up and dust off the flash cards — but that's not very interesting to me, in part because I can't really affect change or even think about it further. Even if I were a subject matter expert with a lot more data and a lot more confidence in my claims, this wouldn't be the most pressing thing I'd be calling my senator about.
The more interesting task here is to critically examine the feeling that making students do 1,000 reps of something is undignified, unbecoming of a STEAM-pilled creative free-thinking future middle manager. You may have already caught that classifying both phonics education and times table drilling as "drill and kill" was a bit of a strawman. Between the Lions, perhaps the greatest show ever made, was phonics education. I know my threes because of School House Rock. I think it's possible to change both the substance of how we give students 1,000 reps and the way we view doing so. To be very tacky and reference myself, I think there's a Storybook Savannah story waiting to be written about this sort of thing. I'm calling my shot now; if you see it within three months, you get hipster cred for being here first.
I do feel there's an underexplored aspect of world-immersion to learning your times tables, a feeling that learning 8 x 13 is not unlike knowing just what a fictional character would say in this situation or that. Or bookkeeping, perhaps; I certainly get joy out of practicing stenography, which is all muscle memory, and perhaps an explanation of that is in order. I also feel that a rigorous framework is in order to calcify my intuition that 1,000 reps of 9 x 5 is a fitting task, but 1,000 reps of "I pledge allegiance" is not. These, perhaps, are our tasks. What a privilege it is, to be thinking about the dignity of others.
At least, I think this is still what people are doing in 2026. I can imagine the one-two punch of the pandemic and chatbots shifting some gears, and I'm not staying on the cutting edge of the field, but as far as I know nobody's proposed a new dominant affect that's caught on.↩