“Number sense is a waste of time.” “People need to stop letting kids play and make kids memorize.” “Kids who learn strategies just take too long to solve problems when they’re older.” Those are just some comments I get when I talk about focusing on building students’ flexibility with numbers, instead of making them memorize their facts.

I’m Christina Tondevold, The Recovering Traditionalist, and today I’d like to address The Biggest Misconception about Math Fact Fluency in our quest to build our minds so we can build the math minds of our kiddos.

Watch the video or read the transcript below:

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Flexibility Formula K-2 online PD course

Flexibility Formula 3-5 online PD course

The biggest misconception is that how we teach fluency is an all-or-nothing scenario. People think that because I’m a proponent of letting kids play, that I don’t think kids should practice and have repetition.

It isn’t an either-or type of situation. It’s a yes-and.

Kids need exposure to building their number sense and playing with numbers and they also need practice and the solidification of those ideas so that they become more accurate, efficient and flexible.

I am all about letting kids play and explore with mathematics, but when we do only that, kids aren’t getting the procedural side of mathematics. However, if we just do drill-based activities to make kids memorize their facts, the kids aren’t getting the conceptual understanding.

With this shift to the “new mathematics” or whatever you want to call it, there was a lot of focus on building the conceptual understanding of mathematics and the focus on procedural fluency kind of went away. If we don’t find a way to balance that conceptual understanding with the procedural fluency, we will quickly see a call for the back-to-basics movement. In fact, some places are already seeing this. It happens time and time again. The pendulum swings one way and that doesn’t work. So it swings the complete other way and soon we see that doesn’t work and then it will swing back the other way.

If we want to stop this pendulum swinging in education, especially math education, we need to incorporate a balance. A balance of helping develop students’ conceptual understanding, which is their flexibility with numbers, but always keeping in mind that we’re doing that along the way to building their procedural fluency.

That procedural fluency is still important. I know that all of my videos tend to sway very heavily on helping you understand the conceptual side of mathematics, because we were only taught the procedural. That’s why I call myself a Recovering Traditionalist.

We were taught mathematics very traditionally, so it’s hard for us to build that conceptual understanding for students if we don’t have it ourselves. But I do believe in a balance of both procedural and conceptual mathematics.

If you want more focused help on how to create that balance in your classroom, that’s exactly what I do inside of my online courses, The Flexibility Formula. If you’re interested in taking a full course for me, go to buildmathminds.com/enroll to learn more about the courses and get enrolled.

We only open up registration a few times a year, so if it’s not open when you go there, just join the wait list, you’ll be the first to be notified when it opens back up.

I hope that this video has helped you better understand that it is a yes-and situation, kids need a balance of both, and I hope that it helped you build your math mind so that you can build the math minds of your students. Have a great day!

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