---
title: "From the Playground: The Kids Who Think They Are Stupid, the Parents Who Gave Up Saying Anything and the Teachers Who Know Rote Learning Is Failing Half the Class | XTables Champions"
url: https://xtableschampions.com/from-the-playground-rote-learning-failing-neurodivergent-conceptual-fluency-2026
description: "Real voices from parents and teachers this week on why rote memorisation is failing so many children, and what people are quietly trying instead."
lang: en
---

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# From the Playground: The Kids Who Think They Are Stupid, the Parents Who Gave Up Saying Anything and the Teachers Who Know Rote Learning Is Failing Half the Class

21 August 2026

This week I have been listening hard. Riley and Owen brought back a set of voices that have been sitting with me since I read them, partly because they are so honest, and partly because they are saying something that a lot of us quietly know but rarely say out loud. I want to share them here because I think other parents and teachers will recognise themselves in them.

## The child who is certain she is broken

One of the voices that stayed with me longest this week came from a parent describing what happens when her daughter is asked a maths question. Not the getting-it-wrong part. The bit before that. She said, "She freezes and then can't access what she does know and then that becomes more evidence to her that she's just bad at it."

That phrase, more evidence to her that she is just bad at it, is doing a lot of work. It describes something that is not really about multiplication at all. It is about a child who has started to build a story about herself from her worst moments, and every bad session adds another brick. What makes this especially hard is that the freezing is not about the maths. It is the anxiety arriving first and shutting the door before the knowledge can get out. The child already knows more than she thinks she does.

If your child does this, I would gently suggest that the goal right now is not more practice of the same kind. It is breaking the story. Short sessions, low stakes, and as many small wins as you can engineer. The knowledge is often there. The door just needs to open.

## The parents who know flashcards are useless but do not know what comes next

Several parents this week described the same dead end. They had tried flashcards. They had tried worksheets. They had tried sitting down at the kitchen table and running through the fours until everyone wanted to cry. And none of it was working. One parent put it plainly: "Her visual memory is a huge struggle for her, and flash cards ain't going to cut it." Another said their child "is totally shutting down with math" and that they need "more than just sitting and repeating them over and over because that doesn't get her attention."

What I hear in these voices is not failure. It is two parents who have already learned something genuinely useful, which is that their children's brains do not store information the way a traditional drill assumes they do. That is not a diagnosis of stupidity. It is a description of a learning style that most schools still have not properly catered for.

The evidence from teachers who are getting results points consistently toward the same things: shorter sessions, variety, movement, sound, story, and repetition spread across time rather than concentrated into one painful sitting. Not a single one of those involves a flashcard.

## The quiet debate happening in staffrooms right now

On Twitter this week there has been a building conversation among educators about the difference between speed and fluency. A lot of teachers are pushing back, some quite firmly, against the idea that going faster is the same as knowing better. One thread circling around was about how timed drills can produce apparent fluency in some children while quietly convincing others that they will never be good at maths. The phrase coming up again and again is fluency without fear.

Alongside that, Mr Fossard has been sharing how his school has averaged a score of over 24 on the Year 4 MTC for three years running, and the approach he describes is anything but white-knuckle drilling. It is careful, consistent, low-pressure daily practice built into the rhythm of the school day. That is a genuinely useful counterpoint to the panic that can set in around MTC season.

There is also a thread picking up on something that does not get nearly enough airtime, which is maths anxiety among teachers themselves. Dr Linda Bortnick has been writing about this and it matters because a teacher who is quietly nervous about maths will, without meaning to, pass that nervousness across a classroom. It is one of those things nobody wants to say but everyone who has spent time in schools has probably felt.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "When a child tells me they hate maths, I always want to know who told them they were bad at it first, because usually someone did."

## The 11-year-old who said they sounded like an idiot

I want to end on a voice that I have not been able to stop thinking about. A young person, in secondary school, posted this week asking for help learning their times tables from scratch. They wrote, "I know I sound like an idiot." They do not sound like an idiot. They sound like someone who never got the right conditions to learn this, who has been carrying the shame of it for years, and who has finally decided to do something about it. That takes more courage than breezing through a worksheet ever does.

The signal underneath all of this week's voices is the same one. Rote repetition, delivered harshly and at speed, is failing a significant number of children. Not because those children cannot learn, but because the method was never built for the way their brains work.

At XTables Champions we have been thinking hard about exactly this, about how to build practice that is genuinely varied, genuinely low-pressure, and genuinely repeatable without being deadening. If any of what you have read here sounds like your child or your classroom, we would love to hear from you. Come and find us and tell us what you are dealing with. We are listening.

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