That was a short answer that turned out to be mostly wrong. The longer answer is “if you don’t understand how this works, you won’t have the intuition to notice when you get absurd results from the calculator”. If you don’t have that intuition, then when you inevitably make a small usage mistake on a calculator (or in matlab or wolfram alpha or whatever), you’ll end up not realizing that you got a clearly wrong answer.
Teachers in the 90s: you won’t always have a calculator.
Me now: you were saying Ms. Knowitall?
That was a short answer that turned out to be mostly wrong. The longer answer is “if you don’t understand how this works, you won’t have the intuition to notice when you get absurd results from the calculator”. If you don’t have that intuition, then when you inevitably make a small usage mistake on a calculator (or in matlab or wolfram alpha or whatever), you’ll end up not realizing that you got a clearly wrong answer.