  Recently the media broadcast the news, together with illustrative videos, of
a so-called Japanese method to perform multiplication by hand without using the
multiplication tables. "Goodbye multiplication tables" was the headline of
several websites, including important ones, where news are however too often
`re-posted' uncritically. The easy numerical examples could induce naive
internauts to believe that, in a short future, multiplications could be really
done without the knowledge of multiplication tables. This is what a girl
expresses, with great enthusiasm, to her father. The dialogues described here,
although not real, are likely and have been inspired by this episode, being
Maddalena the daughter of the author. Obviously the revolutionary value of the
new method is easily disassembled, while its educational utility is highlighted
to show (or remember) the reasoning on which the method learned in elementary
school is based, although mostly applied mechanically.
