I remember being taught pair programming in school and thinking "This is awful". I just can't see how it's supposed to actually work.

Rubbing ducking works, but only has a debugging measure. Explaining what your code is actually doing on a line-by-line basis can sus out the root cause of a bug.

I suppose that's the only time pair programming could work for me; by explaining what each line of code does, another programmer could stop me and tell me "No, that's not right".