The bug I kept seeing in math practice: right answers that were too slow

I kept running into the same weird problem while helping my daughter with math.

She could get the answer right, but it took too long.

That sounds small until you watch what happens next. The new lesson is supposed to be about multi-step problems, division, fractions, or whatever the class is doing that week. But the kid is burning half their working memory rebuilding 7 x 8 in the middle of it.

So the worksheet looks like a concept problem, but the actual bottleneck is recall.

The right answer was not the whole signal