Every week I ask my colleagues Riley and Owen to listen on Reddit and social media for the things parents and teachers are actually saying about times tables, not the polished stuff, but the raw, slightly desperate posts people write when they're not sure who else to ask. This week four voices really stayed with me. They're connected in a way I didn't expect when I started reading.
"She knows 3x5, so why can't she answer 3 times what equals 15?"
This one stopped me. A mum posted that her daughter has a brilliant tutor, has been working at it for weeks, and knows her multiplication facts when they are presented one way. Turn the question around into a missing-number problem, though, and her daughter goes completely blank. "When she is asked '3 times what equals 15' she doesn't get how to answer it, even though she knows 3x5. The different order is just too confusing for her. And then division is so rough."
I kept reading comments below her post and what comes up again and again is that this is not a memory failure at all. It is a flexibility failure. The fact is there but it is stored in one very specific direction, like a one-way street. When the problem arrives from the other end, there is no road.
This matters so much for division. It matters for algebra later. And it matters right now for a stressed mum watching her daughter look confused despite genuine hard work. If your child is in the same boat, you are not imagining it and their tutor is not failing them. This particular gap is genuinely common and it responds well to practice that deliberately flips the question around rather than just drilling facts in the same order every time.
When the tutor doesn't know if it's knowledge or confidence
A tutor posted something I found quietly heartbreaking in its honesty. He is working with a twelve or thirteen year old and wrote, "I'm not entirely sure if he doesn't know how to do multiplication, or if he just lacks the confidence. If he doesn't know, how can I teach him, and if he lacks confidence is there anything I can do to help considering I only see him, at most, once a week?"
This is such an honest question and I suspect a lot of parents at home are asking a version of it too. Is my child stuck or scared? Am I drilling when I should be reassuring? Am I reassuring when I should be practising?
The honest answer is that knowledge gaps and confidence gaps almost always travel together by the time a child reaches secondary school without their tables secure. The tutor is right to be asking. One thing that genuinely helps is low-stakes repetition, not a test, not a timer, just repeated exposure in a calm context where getting it wrong is ordinary and unremarkable. When a child stops bracing for the wrong answer, they often surprise everyone, including themselves.
That connects to something one parent shared about her son. "He has no working memory with multiplication facts, and even some addition and subtraction facts once he gets stressed about getting a problem right." The stress is doing active damage to retrieval. The knowledge is in there. The anxiety is the barrier.
The secondary school moment of reckoning
Several voices this week came from older students, and I always pay attention when teenagers speak up because it takes something to post honestly about this. One sixteen year old wrote, "I've struggled with multiplication since I was a kid. I never realised how it would screw me up until now that I'm learning radicals and trigonometry and I'm completely failing. I asked my bf (who's in AP calc) if he could help and while I learned a little I was actually crying 5 minutes in."
Another voice, similar age: "As a child, I never bothered to learn all of my times tables. So it's starting to bite back at me now."
These two posts are the clearest possible illustration of why the gap matters and why it is so much harder to address once it has compounded over years. Neither of these young people is unintelligent. One is clearly motivated enough to seek help. But by the time trigonometry arrives, the missing foundation is not just an inconvenience, it is a wall.
I do not say this to frighten anyone whose child is young and still building those foundations. I say it because it is exactly why the work matters now, and why doing it in a calm, consistent way at primary age is a genuine kindness to the teenager your child will become.
The adults who are still asking
One voice this week that I could not leave out: a man, 42, with several high-level qualifications, who posted simply that he does not know his times tables and wrote that it "gives me a lot of anxiety and a deep sense of shame." He asked, genuinely and politely, for help.
This week also brought us a teacher in training who admitted that she had forgotten her foundational maths from primary school and was particularly worried about times tables ahead of her first placement.
Both of these people are trying. Both of them are asking the question with real courage. And both of them are evidence that the gap does not sort itself out over time just because life moves on. It sits there, quietly, until something forces it into the open.
As our founder Gal Darrash says, "When adults find the courage to ask the question their ten-year-old self was too scared to ask, that tells me we have to make the learning feel safe for every age, not just children."
At XTables Champions, everything we build starts from that instinct. Low pressure, real confidence building, no countdown timer making you feel like you have already failed before you have started. If anything in this column sounds familiar for your child or, honestly, for yourself, we would love to hear from you. Come and have a conversation with us.