The "MAYA" method

Abstract

Every teachers in general live worried in a certain way, especially those of the area of mathematics, to generate in their students the development of competencies: argumentative, propositional and interpretative competences. The memoristic way in which some notebook factories have promoted the multiplication tables, have originated during the generations that the purposes of the areas are truncated in my point of view by the bad using of this marketing strategy.

The “Maya” Method was born 10 years ago, the same age than my son Juan José, trying to do an educational and social contribution to the community; innovating since the didactics and the significant learning strategies, typical of the constructivist theory which holds that maintains that the knowledge is not discovered, but on the contrary; Knowledge is built from their own way of being, thinking and interpreting information.

I pretend to diminish the possibility of not naturalizing the memoristic knowledge about learning the multiplication tables. The “Maya” method insists on applying  certain  properties of the multiplication of natural numbers and other methodological strategies, letting that, when handling the  multiplication  algorithm,  it is enough to know “from memory” the product of 15 natural numbers by the non-null digits, making more attractive the learning of the named multiplication tables. The usefulness of this method is that it is the gateway to mental calculation and the development of skills and competences in mathematics.