> It often fixes the problem, but it's just something she's learned to do with little understanding.

This reminds me of a hacker koan:

    A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by 
    turning the power off and on.
    Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke 
    sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling
    it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
    Knight turned the machine off and on.
    The machine worked.