math facts learned for ice cream

His final report card said that in spite of al year of work and after school flash card drills, he had not learned his math facts. When we did flash cards, he hemmed, hawed, looked away, taking forever to answer. Certain h e could answer more quickly my patience evaporated.
Tempted to whack him on the head with the flash cards to see if that would pound a few facts into his memory, I resisted vowing to make him spend his summer vacation studying math facts every day until he learned them.
We spent over two hours the first day working our way through the flash cards. I was frustrated. I resigned myself to the fact that my tried and true method would not work.
That night I sat in front of the computer and began typing. The next morning I handed him four sheets, one each of addition, multiplication, division and subtraction tables. “No more flash cards. Fill in the answers on these four pages. I have more copies. When you can do a all four correctly in less than 45 minutes for 5 days in a row, I will take you to the ice cream shop for as many flavors of ice cream as you want.”
His older brother who never had a problem learning his math facts heard me and demanded the same opportunity. I couldn’t believe him. “Okay fine,” I conceded, “but you have to do the four pages in 16 minutes for five days with no mistakes.” He concentrated and scribbled out the answers for 16 minutes every day. He had his ice cream by the end of the week.
Meanwhile I cleaned the house while his math-deficient brother dawdled his way through the pages of math. It took him four and a half hours to complete the pages that first day. When friends came to play, they heard about my deal and begged to be included. I agreed and soon boys sprawled on the floor, chairs and couches scribbling numbers on their four sheets of math.
The did not come back. The next day he worked alone for two hours completing identical pages. By the end of the week he was finishing in about an hour with errors on each page. For the next several weeks he plodded on slowly improving. By the third week he said, “Mom, I am dreaming math facts every night.”
“Great, that means your mind is figuring it out.”
By the fourth week he knew his facts, but could not quite finish in the allotted time.
My husband watched him work one Saturday. He pulled out his stop watch and began timing each page. With time to rest and shift mental gears between pages he took 9 minutes for addition, 13 for multiplication, 11 for subtraction and 11 for division. With the aid of a precise stop watch and time between pages, he could do it.
He dad took over clocking him. By the last page on the fifth day, he had 8 and a half minutes to do division. He went to bed full of ice cream, finished with his summer math, ready for long division and three column multiplication. I know it was a bribe to learn, but it was worth every penny we spent on ice cream.