I don't know if you've ever tried to learn Assembly Language from a teacher who refused to allow computers to be used in her classroom, but it definitely pushed me to a different field of study.
I haven't. But, I think that the purpose of the exercise was to teach you to think logically.
Look at the code posted in this forum. Some of it is really good. But, some of it boggles the mind. "It compiles, so it must work; therefore there is a problem in the IDE/library/someone else's code" is far too prevalent an attitude here.
Analyzing code that you have written, playing compiler, drawing pictures that show what is in memory, etc., were things that I suspect that teacher was trying to teach, in addition to teaching assembly language programming.