Since 2001, the authors have been working with groups of teachers to investigate students' early algebraic thinking--learning representations, connections, and generalizations in the elementary school grades. They began paying attention to students' explicit remarks about regularities in the number system or what students imply by their…

This reprint from the June 1912 issue of "Mathematics Teacher" gives readers a sense of the timelessness of some of the issues relating to teaching for computational fluency.