[chongli]

"drilling" is "practice for understanding"

It really isn’t. The essay makes this point as well. The acquaintance of his who was most interested in math dropped out of the contest team. He went on to become a mathematician because he was actually interested in understanding higher math and how things fit together.

Drilling is just practicing computational tricks to be able to execute them by heart. This would be true regardless of the amount of time pressure or lack thereof. I’ve taken many math courses that had exams in this style and I always hated them. I much prefer trying to figure out a proof I’d never seen before. For any real work, those computations would be done by a computer anyway.

[lupire]

You need to memorize things in order to be effective You need to be able to match patterns to things you've seen before. You need to develop an intuition.

LeBron James much prefers to slam dunks, but he still has to practice the game ad condition.