Procedure. When we get bogged down in the weeds it's often in the weeds of procedure, and it's procedure that gets us out. We search longingly for the one magic step that will save us from the slough of despond. As though we simply missed a step and fell. Maybe we did. Yet maybe, it was something else.
Maybe we were focusing so much on the process to follow that we failed to see the beauty. The reason or purpose behind the problem. In public school, my fellow classmates were always lamenting the "why" of the class. "Why do we need to learn this?" Plays on repeat in the mind of a teacher. In homeschools I've found this question to be less prevalent. At first, I thought that it was because homeschoolers spend so much time addressing the "why" that their students know the importance of learning the difficult things. But now I wonder. Is it rather because homeschool students accept the fact that they need an education and instead of bucking the system, they learn the procedure, complete their work as quickly as possible, and move on. On the surface this creates the perfect student, or does it?
Procedure may get us through some mathematical sloughs; truthfully, the facts of arithmetic are found using procedures. Yet procedure isn't our saving grace. A procedure is man derived, man created, and man proven, but it isn't necessarily man implemented. To bring our mathematics education to the lowest common denominator of procedure is to make our students organic chatGPTs.
If you find yourself leaning heavily on mere procedure to check the box of mathematics learning, take some time to realign yourself to the purpose. We serve an orderly, yet beautiful God. Don't lose the beauty for the sake of mastering a procedure.