[snip]
... 'course, vec, sometimes it's the exact opposite. It wasn't until I started using computers heavily to assist with math-y stuff that I got even the most remote of intuitive grasps on mathematics, and that was with a childhood that had plenty of cooking
and carpentry. Pretty sure it was actually a straight up accounting class in high school (that used mostly calculators, occasionally even of those glorious printer calculators -- maybe we should use those more, or at least make calculation history a bigger/more obvious part of our calculators?*) that did more for me in regards to that sort of thing than pretty much my entire life beforehand, and most of college afterwards. For me, I didn't start getting easy (well, easier... it was still probably three or four years post-highschool that simpler stuff started getting really comfortable) mental manipulation until I was able to do easy
physical manipulation (of the numbers/formula/etc.), and that didn't come until digital (or at least stuff like those older calculators) was available.
Frankly, just using spreadsheets to solve problems in other things (optimizing gaming, messing with statistics, etc.) has probably done more for me than absolutely anything else I've ran into. Being able to easily shift around and make a fairly visual representation of what you're doing is just... it helped more than anything I'd previously worked with. You could sorta' do it with pen and paper/chalk board/etc., but that was much slower, much much less fluid, so on, so forth... being able to build the equation,
see how the parts shift when you change numbers... it's just something you can't really have outside a digital environment.
That finger and toe stuff, hands on things in general... y'could do 'em, but actually contextualizing what you were doing instead of just doing it rote. Not so much. My grandmother, just as an example, didn't
have calculators for most of her life, and still barely uses measurements when cooking. Couldn't and still can't do much with math even if her life depended on it. There's just... other skillsets that can be learned when you're doing that sort of thing than mathematical internalization, y'know? Or it's really hard to go from those particular skillsets to other mathy things.
*Actually, that might really help to some degree. In retrospect when I was doing accounting/spreadsheet tutoring that several of the older (we're talking, y'know, 50s and whatnot)/less math inclined students seemed to do a lot better as the semester went on apparently just from showing them how to open up the history function on the calculator programs the comps we were using had.