Call me old fashioned– go ahead, I’ve been called worse– but I think there are just some things you should know by heart: the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, the opening split infinitive to all things Star Trek, the words to White Christmas, and the multiplication tables up to about 15 or so. 

Back in the crappy olden days we learned some of these things by rote memorization. Remember when you learned to “count by”? 3-6-9-12-15… . 5-10-15-20… . 12-24-36-48… . And then BOOM! “Counting by” is multiplication! Wow.  It was handy learning it this way. By the time you were in the 4th grade, the facts were at your fingertips when you were asked to review multiplication facts.

“Study again those you miss.”

Please direct your attention to the fourth row, third column from the right. Thank you. Now please read this gibberish:

“Even if they said, ’3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focused on the how,” August says in the video.

When someone in the audience (presumably a parent, but it’s not certain) asks if teachers will be, you know, correcting students who don’t know rudimentary arithmetic instantly, August makes another meandering, longwinded statement.

“We want our students to compute correctly but the emphasis is really moving more towards the explanation, and the how, and the why, and ‘can I really talk through the procedures that I went through to get this answer,’” August details. “And not just knowing that it’s 12, but why is it 12? How do I know that?”

I can think of only two reasonable explanations for answering “11” rather than “12”: 

1. “I failed to learn to count by three’s.” 
2. “I had a dumbass teacher like you in 3rd grade and was not made to memorize my multiplication facts.” 

That’s it.
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Iroquois New Standard Arithmetics: Grade Four. Harry DeW. DeGroat and William E. Young. Iroquois Publishing Company, Syracuse, New York. 1938.