> It’s much harder to write well without practicing Is the point of writing, to communicate information from one person to another group or something else? Wh

> It’s much harder to write well without practicing Is the point of writing, to communicate information from one person to another group or something else? Which of these fail to communicate the need: i. "Need to go poo poo! NOW!" ii. "Excuse me Sir. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, I didn't mean to intrude but could you, please, point me to the direction of the nearest latrines, or the head as some might say, so I can relieve myself. The burrito didn't sit well with me unfortunately and it's causing me much distress! I must stress, time is of the utmost essence!" > So yes, you still need to have the students do the thing. I don't disagree with "There is no replacement for actually doing the work". What I do disagree with is the exact nature of the work done: when you have access to a gas/electric driven auger, trying to dig a hole by hand with a teaspoon is neither smart nor productive, like learning how to do long division. > The knowledge would also be fleeting because actually doing the thing makes the knowledge stick more than just observing and understanding the thing Define "stick". 1. I recall, in school, sitting in classes for days where the teacher went over multiplication tables 5x5 through 99x99. It was painful. I don't recall the top off my head what 93x95 is but I know how to calculate it now and I knew how to calculate it then. Hearing and doing 93x95 on a balckboard was not specially valuable nor additionally insightful nor marginally instructive over 13x19 and we could easily have stopped there and done something else with the remaining time. 2. I also recall, sitting in classes where we did long division by hand. You had to show your work and it was incredibly exhausting. I taught myself special tricks just to finish the long division exercises quickly and just be done with it so I could actually do the things that interested me more like reading manuals about vacuum tubes and how triodes worked. 3. Then there was this phase of "unitary method" which was just batshit crazy. They would ask questions like "if it takes 1 person to cut 1 block of wood 10 hours, how long would it take 10 men to cut the same wood?", and you would have to follow this insane mechanical process of decomposing the problem into its constituents and do all this crazy, laborious steps to arrive at the answer. It made absolutely no sense to me then and it still doesn't. It felt like digging a trench with a teaspoon. I had taught myself symbolic manipulation by then and used the "X, Y, Z" method to rapidly solve the problem. I recall annoying the teacher with "if it takes 1 person 10 days to cross a river, how long would it take 10 people to cross the same river?" So back to my question - define "stick". What's the window of "stickiness"? Who defines that window and why? Next: 4. Has long division been sticky for me (I don't recall it at all but I do remember I scored very well on those exercises then because the alternatives would leave me with even less time to do the things I actually liked doing like building mechanical robots)? 5. Exactly how many exercises were necessary and sufficient to prove that I understood long division? 1 page of long division? 5 pages? 100? 6. Do you recall how to do long division? I don't. I can bet you that I can look it up and do it correctly but I won't out of principle: There's absolutely 0 value in knowing how to do long division. It was as useful to me back then as it is now. We should have done something more productive with our time. "But doing long division laid the very foundation of logic and mathematical ability!" - Nonsense. There were students in my class who excelled at long division but couldn't grok calculus no matter how hard they tried. The only thing that being able to do long division proves is that you can pay attention long enough and maintain state. There are far more exciting, interesting ways of proving that ability. If I need to learn long division, I always had the ability to look it up, do some exercises, verify I understand it correctly and complete the task I was relying on long division for. Before the age of LLMs, one might argue that I needed to have some idea that long division was the tool I needed for solving my problem, and thus, having learned long division was valuable. In 2026, I can tell my desired state to a frontier model and it will propose various ways to solve it, then solve it for me if I so desire and walk me through the solution step-by-step if I want it to. So no, long division, "unitary method" and all such matters were and are nonsense, a waste of time and we should replace them with something more meaningful. If we can't come up with that, we should atleast let the kids go outside and play games they like. So again - what's this worry about knowledge being fleeting? Do either you, I or my teacher who taught me long division care whether I posses the knowledge of long division in 2026? Even though I knew long division in 1997, mastered it, excelled at it back then, do I still know it now? Does my inability to explain long division at a moment's notice in 2026 imply long division hasn't been "sticky"? If I never, ever knew long division at all, can I correctly learn it now? Who defines what knowledge is worth fleeting and which one is not? My history teacher and chemistry teacher certainly disagreed on that matter in 1997 and still do! The only truce they were willing to sign is that history and chemistry are both equally important but given that I am a software engineer by trade and deploying high quality systems to production is how I support my lifestyle, I provably disagree with both of them.