When I first became involved in supporting mathematics teaching in schools, there was a joke circulating about a mathematics educator working with novice teachers who gave a lecture on teaching investigatively: an extreme form of abstract theory displacing lived experience. Later the slogan ‘teaching for understanding’ became popular, but as with so many slogans mistaken for policy, it obscured the very issue it was trying to emphasize. It confounded the difference between training behaviour (teaching for performance) and educating awareness (teaching for understanding). Lived experience was ignored in favour of abstract theory. This chapter highlights the lived experience perspective.