ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Picture two teachers: one runs "I do, we do, you do" with a focus on math procedures. The other hands kids an open problem and steps back entirely. Both are stuck at opposite ends of the same pendulum swing.
In this episode, I unpack a theme that kept surfacing across my interviews for the upcoming From Memorization to Thinking summit: math ed keeps overcorrecting. We ditched rote memorization for conceptual understanding (good move) but now practice itself is treated like a dirty word. We opened up "any strategy is fine" (good instinct) but without efficiency and flexibility, that's not real fluency. The fear: the pendulum doesn't settle in the middle. It swings all the way back to drill-and-tell.
Christina walks through how Sarah Schaefer, Mike Flynn, Becky Lord, Kevin Dykema, and Zak Champagne each hit this same idea from a different angle, and what it means for getting the pendulum to actually rest with structure and flexibility, together.
Resources Mentioned: Register for FREE or get Lifetime Access to the From Memorization to Thinking Summit (August 10-12): https://buildmathminds.com/thinking-summit/
