I was "teaching" remedial math a while ago. But really it was just monitoring and facilitating a self-paced module course.

What I found disturbing was the inability to perform simple addition and multiplication. Students were doing this very complex finger counting exercise that seemed to produce poor results.

I went and got a flip chart and wrote out all the multiplications up to 10 on the pages, and at the start of every session I called the students together to do the times table, just like I did a half century ago.

Wow! Did they ever enjoy that! It was an interactive game, they helped each other, teased each other gently, and in short order were all able to confidently respond when I called their name and pointed to something like 7x8=?

There is still room for rote learning in our math system. It's quite a leap to transformations, matrix algebra, integral calculus and Lagrangian optimization techniques, but we have to start somewhere laying a solid foundation.