Conventional wisdom dictates that learning comes in incremental bits and gradually builds up from the bottom. But conventional wisdom should always be questioned. This article describes what a cohort of 17 preservice middle grades teachers encountered as they learned to "stroke the crawl" in a curriculum class that was to provide an unconventional approach to understanding middle grades curriculum concepts. A conversation between one of the professors and one of the students who experienced the course and wrote this article as their means of making more sense of their differing perspectives on the experience is presented. (Contains 2 figures.)