It’s just about time to go back to school. Or at least to learning, even if the lesson is something already learned (but not fully accepted) about the futility of keeping a new year’s resolution in the darkest coldest season of the year. (I like salad for lunch in the winter, because I like salad and my hands are too cold when I get home to make one for dinner, and for the first 10 days of January the salad places, like the gyms, are crowded with the newly resolved; I have to wait for them to clear out, which never takes more than two weeks).

Back to school. Back to the memory I want to describe.

One of the best stories my father told about his college experience came from the late 1940s, from CCNY, from an engineering class. There’s a Basic Energy Equation that is at the bottom of every engineering problem. I don’t know what the equation is, and I’m resisting the Internet research that would quickly inform me, because the formula isn’t the point.

Dad said all the students groaned when they learned the assignment. All semester, no matter what they tackled, the class was required to start with the Basic Energy Equation and build from there. It would be like working a bunch of arithmetic without a calculator: drill after drill starting at one end and plodding to the end.

I’ll bet you can guess the result. The students who finished that class really learned their stuff. Ever after, each was confident about how to tackle any energy problem. Those students had the basics well-laid: neural pathways like rich irrigation canals in their elastic brains.

A lot of people scoff at repetitive tasks. Like we’re above them. Like they should be automated. Piffle. There’s no substitute for practice if you want to incorporate a skill.

So please, don’t ask a computer to do a task you don’t know how to do yourself. Run through problems off-line at first, as much as possible, until you comprehend them. Personally, I don’t even think speed-dialing is a beneficial idea.