“Knowing” the answer to all possible questions is a big task and not worth the effort. What’s so special about multiplying 1 to 12? Why stop at the 12 times table-why not learn 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 times tables? Why not learn your 39 times table? As the table number goes up, the amount to learn increases as a square of the number while the commonality of encountering a problem that uses that table goes down. But knowing ANY answer to ANY question is useful. There are lots of small multiplication problems in day-to-day life, and there is no doubt that knowing the answer to these is useful. I am going to claim that there are three basic reasons:ġ) To directly know the answer to common multiplication questions.ġ) This reason is important. Let’s start with a basic question: exactly why do we use times tables at all? (This is the kind of question my work on has me asking a lot!) To find it being given new emphasis nearly 40 years later struck me as so odd that I thought I should investigate it a little more mathematically. Since that madness ended with decimalization the year after I was born, by the late 1970s when I had to learn my 12 times table, it already seemed to be an anachronistic waste of time. Now, I always believed that the reason why I learned my 12 times table was because of the money system that the UK used to have-12 pennies in a shilling.

My government (I’m in the UK) recently said that children here should learn up to their 12 times table by the age of 9.

Multiplication chart that goes up to 12