Back in my day, the only way we learned our tables was by learning them off by heart. The motivation of doing so was to avoid being humiliated by your teacher and class. Some of you are old enough to remember games like the “Stand Up, Sit down” game where the goal is to remain standing by answering a maths fact. Thankfully things have moved on but why was learning tables by rote such a bad idea? It worked, didn't it?