In today's world, where the volume of knowledge everyone must deal with is increasing exponentially, many educators agree that schools must focus on developing skills for life-long learning. But what does that mean for an area such as algebra? Teachers' goal in school algebra should be to guide students to "work smarter" with algebraic symbols and that they should do this by placing explicit emphasis on teaching strategies that develop "algebraic insight." Teachers want to alter the focus of their teaching so that they spotlight the meaning of algebraic expressions and the structures that they reveal, rather than putting all of the emphasis on following the steps of standard algebraic manipulations, which technology may well take over. Students with algebraic insight can readily extract information about structure and meaning from an algebraic expression and they are in the habit of doing this with all the algebraic expressions that they meet. In this article, the authors describe how students' confidence is strengthened when teachers spotlight structure, conventions, and key features of algebraic symbols. They also discuss how "algebraic insight" can be developed among students. (Contains 1 table and 4 figures.)