Yeah, that's fair. I mean I always liked math for the most part, but learning times tables was definitely an annoying phase. But for me, finding those patterns was always going to be preferable to rote memorization, and 9s had a nice easy pattern. All the even numbers have some useful patterns too, and I still think about those patterns when I help my kids with homework, but none are of them are as simple and useful as the 9s pattern.