I'm thirty something. How did my teachers engage me in doing math? How did they engage me in rote-memorizing the multiplication tables when portable calculators

I'm thirty something. How did my teachers engage me in doing math? How did they engage me in rote-memorizing the multiplication tables when portable calculators were already a thing, being operated by coin-cells or little solar panels? Part of teaching is getting kids to learn why and how things are done, even if they can be done better/faster/cheaper with new technology or large scale industrial facilities. It's not easy, but I think it's the most important part of education: getting kids to understand the subjacent abstract ideas behind what they're doing, and learning that there's value in that understanding. Don't really want to dichotomize, but every other way kids will just become non-curious users of magic black boxes (with black boxes being computers, societal systems, buildings, infrastructure, supply chains, etc).