

Is There Any Point to the 12 Times Table? - cdwhite
http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/06/26/is-there-any-point-to-the-12-times-table/

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ronaldx
"Multiplying-in-columns" is quite out of fashion. A 'grid' or 'boxes' method
is surely now taught to/used by a majority of students in the UK. Long
multiplication is not considered best practice and many students don't see it.

This is thankfully for the better, as weaker students are better able to
follow the method and stronger students can extend more intuitively to general
distributive methods (making mental arithmetic more convenient).

In my opinion, this makes the 12 times table even more irrelevant.

Links:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/maths/number/multi...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/maths/number/multiplicationdivisionrev1.shtml)
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11258175](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11258175)

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breadbox
Learning it up to 9 is obviously important, unless you don't think being able
to do any kind of mental math is useful.

But the 10s and 11s are very easy to learn, so there's not much reason to stop
before 11. I suppose there isn't much objective reason to include the 12s.
They make a nicer endpoint than the 11s, and are no easier or harder than
(say) the 6s or 8s, but they don't come in handy nearly as often.

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fendrak
Food items are often dealt with in dozens - eggs and doughnuts, for example.
Presumably, most people will end up dealing in dozens of eggs at some point.

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mjn
One minor confound is that the difficulty of each new fact isn't identical.
While going from 10 to 11 requires learning 11 new facts, 9 of them follow an
easy pattern (11 x n = nn), and the 10th you get for free with decimal
notation. That leaves only 11 x 11 = 121 to be memorized individually.

Oddly I don't think I ever memorized the 12 x [0-9] case myself. It's quick
enough to recover it from smaller numbers (12 x 7 = 70 + 14) that I just did
that in school, and memorized only 11 x 12 and 12 x 12.

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EliRivers
Knowing multiples of 12 makes working with angles a great deal easier, given
360 degrees in a circle.

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thaumasiotes
who are these people working frequently with angles, but doing it in degrees?

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cgore
People with compasses, in the woods, not getting lost and eaten by a bear.

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iopq
There is no point past 9.

