Stop telling kids you’re bad at math. You are spreading math anxiety ‘like a virus.’

[Donald Ian Rankin]

16. How can learning basic maths be fun?

I'm a professional mathematician; I love doing maths.

But as a child, before I got to the bits of maths that I found fun, I had to learn to add, subtract, multiply and do at least a little division. And I found learning those extremely tedious, and I'm not sure there is a way to teach them that isn't.

Are there approaches to education that produce children capable of doing basic maths reliably, without forcing them through vast numbers of tedious repetitions of "add/subtract/multiply these two numbers"? I'm not convinced there are.