Rote learning versus thinking.

Should children learn facts by rote, or should they they be taught to think? In maths which should be teach? The answer is both. I spent a significant period of my life as a quality manager in the medical devices industry. My job was to stop people thinking. When you do something without thinking you don’t make mistakes (and in the medical devices industry mistakes aren’t acceptable). It is only when you think about an activity that you get things wrong. As an example consider when drivers change gear. On a manual shift car, drivers change gear without thinking routinely, and they do so without encountering a problem. However, when they think about changing gear, they get it wrong and grind the gearbox cogs together. Had they done it automatically they would probably have got it right. So lesson for maths is that for basic routines, which people will use often and repeatedly, the best strategy is to train people to do them automatically, to do them without thinking, to know the method and just apply it. This is where rote learning, and repeated practice is important.
However, before we can solve a maths puzzle using standard routines, we have to convert the problem to a standard form which is tractable to a solution using them. This is where thinking is required. If all one can do is manipulate the standard routines, then one is destined to be nothing more than a calculator. So it is important to teach children how to interpret problems and using logic rearrange them into a form which can then be solved using the standard routines. This is where pupils need imagination and insight. This is the fun part of maths. So many children are put off maths because all they are ever expected to do is practice the standard routines, and then as a consequence they find the subject boring. At Puppet Maths we teach pupils to think and use their imagination when solving maths puzzles, but we also, by using puppets introduce an imaginative element to the activity of practicing the standard routines and alleviate the boredom that so many pupils experience when learning them.