As a kid they gave us a math text book in first grade. It had the work in it from sept 1962 to June 1963.
I loved math so much that I finish all the chapters with all the problems by October 1st.
We had a book called "7 a day" with 7 problems in each section. I'd usually run through multiple sections each lesson and then they put me in the "8 a day" book. I learned then that hard work is often rewarded only by more hard work. The teacher would also chastise me for not showing my workings but to me, there were no workings in something like 42/7.
Back in the day there were no calculators so multiplication tables were supposed to be memorized from 1 x 1 up to 12 x 12
a grid that was 12 by 12.
once I memorized it I made a multiplication table from 1 x 1 to 20 x 20 and memorized it.
Yep, we had those. For some reason I had a blind spot for 7x7. Long since remedied, of course. Once you get beyond the 12x12 table, you can usually work them out in your head pretty quickly but nothing wrong with a bit of memorization.