> drilling is key to early mathematical learning. I was told to memorize the times table, and tried but never managed to succeed. Instead, I found that I got a

> drilling is key to early mathematical learning. I was told to memorize the times table, and tried but never managed to succeed. Instead, I found that I got along just as well by memoizing them instead; that is, I would compute the parts I needed on the fly in the margins of the paper. (Example: Say I need to find 37. I happen to know that 33=9, which I can double to get 36=18, plus 3 to get 37=21. These figures would be written down, so when I later needed 47 I could easily add another 7 to get 28. I had similar tricks for various other numbers, and could generally get the figure I needed--if it wasn't already written down--in a few hops.) These contortions don't seem to have significantly affected my mathematical development, but they did* improve my logic and reasoning skills (or possibly merely showed that I had them). Particularly now that nearly everyone I know carries a calculator in their pocket, I don't see why we would continue to focus on rote learning over actually understanding how the underlying principles work.