Numbers are real things. The more one explores them, the more experiences one has of them, the more confidently one comes to rely on them.
automatic cash registers (and calculators to some extent) reduced numbers to numerals (or in some cases mere signifiers?) so it any wonder that people whose daily work is facilitated by them are not only enabled to lose (or fail to acquire) numeracy but have had numeracy and basic arithmetic (add/subtract whole numbers) displaced by this.
The year my parents bought us a dart-board for xmas (mid grade 2) and the subsequent dart-play-binging and even dreaming dart scoring really cemented my basic arithmetic skills. The modulo 21 version where if you went *over* 21 you went back to the residual points over 21, putting a big premium on being able to subtract your current score from 21 and seeking a 3 dart combination of scores to sum to that value and then recalculate after each dart-throw.
There were no calculators of note (mechanical tape adders though) in my youth so long-addition/subtraction were ubiquitous skills as was doing the same in your head for at least a few digit numbers. They became widespread by the time I was out of college and change-making cash registers the same... numeracy had already begun to become numerology at that time (late 70s).
I learned a slip-stick out of curiosity and the portability/compactness of a trig table-on-a-stick in middle school with model rocketry (estimating altitude visually) and it took me from working with numbers to working with quantities and magnitudes and estimates and "acceptable errors". I probably didn't do a single calculation with one after that (maybe a couple) but it really set in my mind how exponents/logs worked and an intuition for trigonometric relations (mostly just looking up a tangent of an angle and dividing by some odd number being the standoff-pacing from the launch of the oberver).
Half the folks here surely used a slide-rule at some point in their life and roughly half probably only barely knows what they look like or how they work? Pretty quick transition. Zs and Millenials probably will have the same experience with maps and directions... given the mobile devices.
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