[Masahiro42]

so as I've been learning kanji, I've noticed that they all have stroke orders. I also notice that I tend to not follow them. I've figured that the largest point to these would be calligraphy, but I've heard from friends that my teachers in coming years will be more concerned with stroke orders and I've had one friend tell me that stroke order helped him memorize the kanji. Most of the stroke orders seem counter-intuitive to me though and can take me longer to write, so I'm wondering if anyone could tell me what the point to them is? I would ask my teacher but it didn't occur to me to ask until just now as I'm studying for finals