Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to force my daughter to memorize her times tables. We’ve tried writing them down on paper, repeating them in the car, singing them in the shower, rapping them while riding bikes and reciting them on a skateboard. Most recently, we’ve been using flash cards and while that appears to be helping it still hasn’t been a home run.
To be fair, I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I memorized my times tables or how I did it. My father likely gave me a small sheet of paper with all of them written out – he loved to write things out on small sheets of paper – and told me to memorize them or I wouldn’t get to watch Dave Corzine, Reggie Theus, Ricky Sobers and a young kid named Michael Jordan play their next game. It’s become a personal quest of sorts for me to help Z know all of her times tables by heart.
“If I can do it, she can do it,” the thinking goes. Or maybe a more accurate statement is, “If I had to do it, she should have to do it.”
Either way, we’re memorizing these god damn times tables!
And then the other day on the playground, one of the parents said the craziest thing.
“IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER IF YOU LEARN YOUR TIMES TABLES.”
What? It doesn’t matter if you don’t know your times tables? Does it matter if you don’t know the difference between deep dish and thin crust pizza? Does it it matter if you think the Atlantic is better than The New Yorker? Does it matter if you think James Brown was more talented than Prince? Yes, it matters. It all matters. Doesn’t it?
This question has been keeping me up at night for the past two weeks as I furiously flash those flash cards like a young Mike Tyson working the bag.
6 x 4 is …
HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT? IT’S MARK AGUIRRE’S OLD NUMBER. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT.
And then it hit me. Sports! That’s how I memorized my times tables.
6 x 4 = Mark Aguirre (sorry Kobe)
8 x 4 = Magic Johnson
11 x 3 = Larry Bird
7 x 6= James Worthy
11 x 3 = Abdul Jabbar
Growing up, sports and numbers went hand and hand. I spent hours pouring over NBA box scores and because of that, numbers weren’t just numbers. They were players. They were assists. They were rebounds. They were points. They were shooting percentages and baseball batting averages. They were a way to better understand the world of sports I loved with all my heart.
3 x 2 = Julius Erving
5 x 2 = Maurice Cheeks
4 x 2 = Marques Johnson
11 x 2 = Andrew Toney
So that’s it. All I have to do to get Z to memorize her times tables is develop her appreciation for 1970’s and 80’s NBA basketball. That shouldn’t be so hard.
As for the question of whether you need to know your times tables to succeed in life, of course you do. How else would you know that Bob McAdoo, Yao Ming, Elvin Hayes, Kyrie Irving, Walt Frazier, Klay Thompson and Isiah Thomas were all 11×1?
