"Wire What You've Fired!"

In week one of Dr. Zadina's workbook, she discusses the need to use repetition in the classroom. She explains that repetition is necessary in order to "wire what you've fired" (Zadina, 2008). She goes on to briefly discuss possible teaching techniques when asking students to memorize events or processes. Read it, write it, say it... practice the stages over and over so that they become wired in your brain. I definitely think that repetition and practice are necessary in order to wire what you've fired, but I think that this is a very tricky subject. When I teach my math students new content, it is 100% necessary that we practice and discuss misconceptions and make mistakes in order to form a deeper understanding of the material. But the point of practicing is not so that they can memorize a process, it is so they can experience problems and use logical reasoning to figure out the answers based on what they have learned. For example, if I am teaching my students how to solve multi-step equations and I use the following example: 3x - 4 = 8. According to the properties of equality, you add 4 to both sides, 3x = 12, and then divide both sides by 3, x = 4. A student who is memorizing information would think that, for every multi-step equation, you add a number to both sides and then divide each side by a number. When the student realizes this is not the case, memorization has become more cumbersome than trying to deeply understand why we are performing the steps.

Teachers are being urged to stop asking students to memorize information, instead the students should have such a deep understanding of the material that memorizing becomes unnecessary. Along these lines of memorization, I have heard so many arguments about the memorization of multiplication facts. When I was in elementary school, I had to do mad minutes in order to memorize the multiplication tables. In my opinion, this is a set of information worth memorizing. CCSS-M are encouraging teachers to help students develop a more conceptual understanding of multiplication. I think this is great; I think understanding why multiplication works the way it does is something that has been overlooked in elementary school for many years. However, I think this is a situation in which conceptual understanding does not and cannot take the place of memorizing multiplication facts. I have high school students who can't figure out the greatest common factor of 24 and 32 because they don't know their multiplication facts. It is such a hindrance in Algebra I that I have been tempted to do mad minutes with my students as their daily warm-up. Fluency is out of the window if the student can't multiply. Some argue that students shouldn't have to memorize these facts because they will always have a calculator available to them. I think that the calculator is an amazing tool and we should absolutely incorporate it into the math classroom, but when my students have to use the calculator to perform basic multiplication facts it becomes a crutch rather than a tool.

Here is a cool article about multiplication fact memorization:
Mastery of Multiplication