difficult child still doesn't know her multiplication facts, and we've been working on them since the 3rd grade. She's in 11th now. It has made a huge impact on her math ability, and she struggles so much. It also took years for her to grasp the concept that division is the opposite of multiplication, even though she didn't have that issue with addition/subtraction.
Her teachers here don't worry about it and it infuriates me. They just tell her to use her calculator. We had a meeting about this very thing a few weeks ago. I was told that it's not "atypical" and that they have 18 year old kids that don't know that subtraction is the opposite of addition and that's not "atypical" either. Meanwhile, she can do a problem over and over and over again, and then suddenly change the way she does it and insist it's right.
For example, an algebra problem - after multiple steps, she got it down to:
X-3=-5
Instead of adding 3 to each side to solve for X, which she had been doing for years and had just completed a problem not 2 minutes prior, she wanted to add across, which you can't do because you can't add unlike terms. She wanted to add 1X-3 which gave her -2X=-5. I could not convince her that was not correct, even when I showed her - and had her walk me through - the previous problem that she had done correctly.
With word problems, she also doesn't know when to add, subtract, multiply, or divide. Forget getting an algebraic equation out of one. And she's essentially been in algebra for 3 years (pre-algebra in 9th grade, algebra IA (algebra split over 2 years) in 10th, and now algebra IB).
IOW, not being able to grasp multiplication facts is just a symptom of bigger math issues. Since my SD thinks it's not atypical, I'm having her privately evaluated for a math learning disability.
ETA: difficult child really wants to go into forensic science, but knows she won't be able to if we can't figure out what she needs in order to learn math.