The Pendulum Problem We Have in Math Education

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to: The Pendulum Problem We Have in Math Education

Okay, I want you to picture two teachers.

Teacher one runs a tight ship. I do, we do, you do. Here’s the procedure, watch me model it, now you try it exactly that way. Teacher two runs the opposite room – here’s an open math problem, go figure it out any way you can, I’m not going to help you.

Here’s the thing. Both of those teachers think they’re doing the right thing. Both of them are at opposite ends of the pendulum swing that’s been happening in math education AND I’ve been both of those teachers.

I started out being a very traditional math teacher and then went the complete opposite of giving students an open-ended problem and letting them figure it out. Hence the name Recovering Traditionalist.

For the past 15+ years I’ve been focused on helping educators move towards the open-ended, conceptual understanding, flexibility-focused, discovery-style teaching but what I’ve seen is that it’s maybe gone a little too far.

So I’ve been interviewing some of my favorite math educators to learn from for a new type of summit that will be released August 10, 11, and 12th.  Before I started interviewing them I had named the summit FROM Memorization TO Thinking: A Math Summit for Elementary Educators.

I thought it would be a summit about helping teachers move away from Memorization to more Thinkinging in mathematics…which it is, but it’s also sooooo much more.

As I was talking to presenters for this summit, I noticed something I wasn’t expecting going in. I didn’t set out to make this a theme. But over and over, in totally separate conversations, with people who’ve never talked to each other about this, the same idea kept surfacing.  The pendulum with math education needs to stop swinging FROM Memorization TO Thinking because soon the pendulum will swing back.

We get tired of rote memorization, so we swing hard toward thinking and discovery. And then that swing goes too far – kids are given a task and just left to flounder with no structure at all – and now there’s a backlash building. And the fear, the real fear, is that the pendulum doesn’t stop in a good, balanced middle. It swings all the way back. Back to “let me just tell you exactly what to do.” Back to memorization and drill.

I don’t want that. And neither does anyone I talked to for this summit.

Let me walk you through a few of the places this showed up.

Sarah Schaefer talked about this in terms of balance. Not “structure versus freedom” – we need both, at the same time. A lesson needs a skeleton, something to hold onto, but it also needs to flex.  We can’t be rigid about hitting every single part of your lesson plan no matter what’s actually happening in the room.

Mike Flynn came at it from the strategy side. For a long time, math class had one right way to solve a problem – typically the textbook’s way. So the pendulum swung toward “any way you can solve it is fine.” And that’s true, to a point. But if that’s the whole story, kids never build efficient, flexible strategies. Real fluency isn’t just “I got an answer somehow.” It’s accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility, all three, together.

Becky Lord talked about the same swing from a different angle – practice. We moved away from drill and flashcards because we wanted real conceptual understanding, and that was the right move. But somewhere in that swing, practice itself got treated like a dirty word. And now that’s swinging back too. My worry is we lose the conceptual understanding piece entirely in the process, instead of just adding practice back in alongside it.

Kevin Dykema, past NCTM president, framed it as a timing question, which I think is the clearest way to think about it. Let kids make sense of something first – notice patterns, try things out – and then bring in the vocabulary and the procedure after.  Not before.  The pendulum swinging back to “let me tell you what to do, kid” skips that sense-making step completely, and that’s the part we can’t afford to lose.

And Zak Champagne pointed out that even “build your own curriculum from scratch” was itself a pendulum swing – a reaction to genuinely bad materials. Now that better instructional materials exist, the real conversation isn’t “trust the curriculum or don’t.” It’s how you use it. How you adapt it to still leave room for curiosity.

So here’s what I keep coming back to. Every one of these people is describing the same thing, from a different seat. And what they all land on, independently, is that the goal was never “pick a side.” The goal is figuring out how to get that pendulum to actually rest in the middle – structure and flexibility, strategy and freedom, practice and understanding, together.

That’s not one session at this summit. That’s the whole thing. We have a theme for each day; Think, Share, and Connect.  And every day you’re going to hear a different presenter wrestling with their own version of getting the pendulum to stop swinging. So if this idea landed for you even a little bit, I’d love for you to come sit in on the full conversations. 

Registration is free, but like I said this is a whole new style of summit.  Free registration gives you 24 hours to watch the sessions for that day.  All sessions for each day will get released at 7am Pacific time and you have until 7am Pacific time the next day to watch them.  Then the next day’s sessions will get released.  If you want to make sure you can come back and watch and rewatch (and you will want to) then grab the Lifetime Access Pass.  Yup, you heard that right.  We want you all coming back and revisiting these ideas year after year.  The price you see on the registration page for the Lifetime Access is the lowest price you will see.  So if you are interested, grab that Lifetime Access right on the registration page.  It gives you Lifetime access to all three days, plus my live sessions I’ll be doing each day, and an Implementation Guide.  This guide isn’t a fill-in-the-blank workbook.  It’s a summary of the amazing ideas each presenter shared along with the action items that will help you stop that pendulum swinging From Memorization to Thinking and land in the middle.

Go to https://buildmathminds.com/thinking-summit/ to register and I’ll put the link in the show notes description as well.

Alright, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, I hope you’ll come join me at the summer summit to build your math mind so you can build the math minds of students.