I recently urged you to not lose beauty for the sake of mastering a procedure. I still hold to this, but I want to remind you not to fall off of the horse on the other side. Procedures are important. While it may be true that focusing solely on procedures reduces are children to computers, it is also true that man has a role to play with procedures. Primarily, man is the creator of the procedure. Man reflects the creator God yet man cannot create out of nothing, like God did, but man still seeks to create. This is shown in our tendency to order creation, build from creation, predict patterns, and follow procedures. Where did these procedures come from? Surely, some came from God. Specifically, the law in the bible is full of procedure. Yet, that is outside of the scope of this post. The procedures that students engage with in mathematics were assembled by mathematicians and teachers to help them understand and master a difficult concept.
I encourage you to develop your God given desire to create by writing some of your own mathematical procedures. Because many problems in algebra can be attempted and conquered using different methods, many students find algebra confusing. Instead of handing an algebra student the procedure for calculating the distance between points in a plane, have him use reason, logic, and algebra that he already knows to create his own procedure. Geometry tries to strengthen the intellectual muscles of our students by having them complete proofs with shapes. There are many different ways to prove the Pythagorean Theorem, and not one of them is wrong. However, some are more beautiful than others.
If you can create a procedure for a mathematical truth and declare it beautiful, then you have started to glimpse the goodness of God!