Hi Sherri,

Thanks again for your interest in the piece, and for taking the time to respond. You have certainly challenged some of my perspectives.

I can understand the negative connotations of *saving young minds* and should have caveated it right away. When I first heard those words, I was inspired by the sense of urgency to our work as educators. My drive towards Education came from a frustration that many students are failed by their maths education (the ‘disconnect’ I mentioned in the opening). Many students are robbed of their natural learning dispositions — their curiosity, wonder and innate capacity for problem-solving — by the formal structures of schooling. In that context, ‘*saving* seems appropriate. As the article hopefully makes clear, the implications for how we support students’ development are far from binary — educational change is a holistic process as you describe, and it will not be achieved with sweeping reforms or scalable technologies alone.

I did not write the piece with my male identity in mind, but perhaps this is suffused throughout my writing and someting I also need to be more aware of. As an educator, my identity is shaped more by the experiences I outlined in the initial piece, rather than by my gender, ethnicity or any other conventional demographic.

Your comment has taught me the importance of conveying nuance much earlier in my writing, which I’ll certainly keep in mind for future pieces.