As a child, I was very easily bored. As such, anything that had to be learned by rote repetition was anathema, and I would go to insane lengths to avoid it. (This may be because I learned English that way… my mother tells me that when I was three or so, and would learn a new word, when she would come in to check on me that night she would find me nearly asleep, whispering the word to myself over and over. The next day, I would start using that word perfectly.)

Multiplication tables? Unnecessary — I easily remembered some of them (the ones, twos, fives, and tens, for instance), and a few problems from the others (squares, like six-times-six and eight-times-eight, and a handful of others), but for the rest, I figured them out when I needed them, mostly by tricks (the first digit of nine-times-anything was always one less than the “anything” part, and the second was always nine minus the first), or by counting up or down from one of the ones I remembered. I wasn’t very fast at math, but I managed to keep up with my classes that way.

There’s no inherent logic to names, dates, and events, so I never did very well in history classes, but that didn’t bother me too much. Ditto with foreign languages — my required two years of Spanish were painful, but I passed and most of my classmates didn’t seem to be doing much better, so I didn’t worry about it. The other subjects were mostly logical, and once I figured out the logic behind them, I had little problem with them.

Of course, anything that I found interesting (such as programming) got so much practice that I automatically learned what I needed to know about them. My motto was, and still is, that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. 🙂 But even there, I couldn’t stand the plodding pace of traditional learning. I had to teach myself by experimentation, playing with whatever I wanted to learn until it sank in.

It wasn’t until I reached my mid-twenties that I realized how badly this lack of basic memorization and math skills was hindering me, and buckled down to learn them properly. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was effective… I still double-check myself, but I can do most math in my head now, and I’ve learned some skills that make it possible for me to memorize practically anything at will. If I’d had these skills when I was in school, I’d have been a straight-A student with practically no effort, and I plan to make sure that any children I have learn them right off the bat.

I sometimes wonder whether it really hurt me, overall, not to have those skills earlier in life. It made some things a lot more painful than necessary, but I’m certain that figuring out ways to bypass (and hide) my lack probably contributed to my overall intelligence, perhaps in ways that more than compensated for the lacks themselves. I don’t see any way to test that, but it would be interesting to find out.