&quot;
This child imagined ‘Math’ to be a continuous string of mechanical tasks—an unending prospect of practice and drill.  It was hard to convince him that there would not be any more tables in subsequent years&quot;<p>Well, I enjoy maths, but for me my entire mathematical education was always about memorizing tables. It was made worse by the fact that during Polish exams you cannot use advanced calculators(only ones that can do addition&#x2F;multiplication) so for the final exams at the age of 19 I had to remember loads of different formulas, trigonometric values for common angles etc etc.<p>I&#x27;m not saying he was wrong, but in a lot of educational systems maths is 90% about remembering stuff.