I can relate to your long division example. In grade school my mom helped[1] me put in a ridiculous amount of effort in order to get through my school's spelli

I can relate to your long division example. In grade school my mom helped[1] me put in a ridiculous amount of effort in order to get through my school's spelling tests. I have come to believe that the reason that I couldn't spell was because at the time I did not understand the rules behind how the letters form together to get words. Simply memorizing how words are spelled took a lot of painful practice. A more recent example is when I was first learning lambda calculus I wanted to understand how church encoding worked to allow basic integer operations with just function abstraction and application. Most of the operators are easy except for predecessor, which is absolutely nightmarish to get on your own. I tried memorizing the definition I found on wikipedia for over a year to no avail, but once I understood how it was working ... pred = λ n . λ f . λ v. n ( λ a . λ b . b (a f) ) λ k . v λ i . i I haven't yet forgotten what it is. [1] - well, basically dragged me kicking and screaming EDIT: formatting