Comment by watwut

I never memorized multiplication tables and was always one of those "good in math" kids. An attempt to memorize that stuff ended with me confusing results and being unable to guess when I did something wrong. Knowing "tricks" and understanding how multiplication works makes life easier.

> "Just memorize it, it'll make your life so much easier."

That is because you evaluate cost of memorization to 0, because someone else is paying it. And you evaluate the cost of making mistakes due to constantly forgetting and being unable to correct to 0, because simply the kid gets blamed for not having perfect memory.

> or translate a language when they haven't memorized the vocabulary words in the lesson so they have to look up each one

Teaching language by having people translate a lot is an outdated pedagogy - it simply did not produced people capable to understand and produce the language. If the kids are translating sentences word by word, there was something going on wrongly before.