I READ Adrian Taylor’s letter (ViewPoints, January 29), concerning the teaching of maths where he criticises a technique that I had not heard of, which apparently replaced learning the times table. Intrigued, I looked up these techniques known as ‘chunking and gridding’.

Despite having a grade A in maths and knowing my times table, I find long multiplication and long division by hand fairly error-prone. I was pleased to find that chunking and gridding were variations of long division and long multiplication respectively that were obviously easier to perform than the traditional methods.

With multiplying, only single digit numbers had to be multiplied and worrying about carrying tens over was left to the final stage of the process.

For division, you didn’t have to know all the 23 times table to divide by 23, or likewise any other number.

What it certainly isn’t is a replacement for learning the times table. You still need to know your times table to perform a long multiplication and, to a certain extent, a long division.

I find too many adults today claim to be innumerate, showing just how effective the “old tried and tested” techniques really are.

Hopefully, new techniques like these will help children to become numerate without so much pain.

Finally, I found I was baffled by Adrian’s statements that the times tables are the only positive numbers that are easily used in maths questions and that the new methods make individual numbers mean nothing.

Is this maybe a metaphysical statement?

GRAHAM NEWTON, Church Hill Road, Oxford