[XorNot]

I never learned times tables in schools. Just struggled on through until they stopped asking me to memorize them.

Then way later in my 20s, when it was handy to know how to remember some multiples quickly, I realized that obviously there's a lot of patterns in there, and of course the magic of looking for an easier problem to do mentally to solve a more complex one.

No amount of effort at memorization ever succeeded in even trying to give me those tools, and they're so general - you can apply them to everything.

My entire 90s educational experience is a memory of teachers saying "you need to know your times tables" and no one actually trying to teach even basic reasoning about how numbers worked (which I suspect is why programming lept out at me - it's all number manipulation but it's all about the algorithms and patterns and finally things started to make sense).