From the Playground: The Adults Who Are Still Ashamed, the Schools Running Out of Budget and the Parents Quietly Doing the Maths All Over Again

The voice that stopped me this week was not from a child. It was from a 42-year-old man. He wrote online, simply and honestly, that despite having multiple high-grade degrees and qualifications, he does not know his times tables and it gives him, as he put it, "a lot of anxiety and a deep sense of shame."

That sentence sat with me for a long time. Because he is not alone, not even close. A secondary school student also posted this week, admitting that they have struggled with multiplication since childhood and only now, facing radicals and trigonometry, are feeling the full weight of it. "I was actually crying five minutes in," they wrote, after asking their boyfriend for help.

And then there was the 11th grader who said they have been ashamed of not knowing their tables since third grade, but have quietly decided to go back and relearn everything, year by year, on their own. "I know I sound like an idiot," they wrote. They do not sound like an idiot. They sound like someone with more determination than most.

What strikes me about all three of these people is that the shame has been carried silently, sometimes for decades. Nobody flagged it as a problem at the time. The gaps just calcified, and life kept moving, until something, a trigonometry lesson, a job application, a child starting primary school, made them impossible to ignore.

If this is you, or someone you love: it is not too late. The fact that you are still asking the question is the only thing that matters.

Owen flagged something this week that I think is flying under the radar. A classroom teacher posted that her students used to use a mental maths platform regularly, but the school no longer has the funding to keep it. Gone. Another teacher described a previously popular platform as having always been "just fine" anyway, suggesting that even when the budgets were there, the tools were not always doing the job.

This is not a small thing. When schools lose access to maths software mid-year, it is the children with the least support at home who feel it most. A teacher also posted asking what she could realistically do to encourage children to practise their times tables at home voluntarily, which tells you everything about how much of this work quietly falls outside school hours.

One teacher's note from Twitter this week was more hopeful. Mr Fossard shared that his school has averaged a score of over 24 on the Year 4 Multiplication Tables Check for the last three years, and offered to share what has worked. That kind of generous, practical knowledge-sharing between teachers is exactly what the sector needs more of, especially when budgets are shrinking.

As our founder Gal Darrash put it recently, "When I hear teachers losing access to the tools they rely on, it makes me more determined to make sure what we build is genuinely worth having in a classroom."

A thread appeared this week from a mum who has just started training as a primary school teacher. She wrote openly that she cannot reliably remember her times tables, long division or much of the foundational maths she learned as a child. She asked, with what felt like real vulnerability, whether anyone had tips for relearning it quickly.

I want to sit with this for a moment, because she is not unusual. There will be parents reading this right now who are in exactly the same position: trying to help a child with their tables while quietly panicking that they do not fully know them themselves. A separate parent posted this week describing how their daughter's arithmetic was making homework feel fraught and stressful. "Sorry, I sound really unloving and harsh," they added. They do not sound unloving. They sound exhausted and honest.

Parents relearning alongside their children is something I think we should talk about much more openly, without embarrassment. The parent who sits down and says, "I am not sure about this one either, let us figure it out together," is doing something genuinely powerful. They are showing a child that not knowing is the starting point, not the failure.

This is also one of the things that shapes what we try to do at XTables Champions. The platform is built so that children can practise without a parent needing to sit next to them explaining everything, which takes the pressure off households where maths confidence is already stretched. If you would like to find out whether it might work for your child, we would love to hear from you.

Several posts this week circled around the same underlying worry: are we expecting children to memorise their tables in a way that actually makes sense, or are we just repeating the same approaches that did not work for us?

One parent wrote plainly that they had been told their own struggles were down to failing to memorise times tables, and had been pushing their child to do the same. Then they stepped back and asked: am I overcorrecting? Another voice, from someone who described themselves as neurodivergent, argued that teaching multiplication purely through rote is a poor introduction to complex mathematical thinking, because a child who has memorised the facts can still have no idea what multiplication actually means.

These are not fringe views. They reflect a genuine, growing conversation among teachers and parents about the difference between fluency and anxiety, between knowing something and being terrified of being tested on it. I do not think we need to choose between the two. Children do need to know their tables. But how we get them there matters enormously.

That is what I am hearing from parents and teachers this week. Raw, honest, and worth listening to.