The Core of Math Anxiety: Mathematics is Abstract and Our Purpose for Learning it is Concrete Think of the moment when kids understand that fingers — not just their fingers — is a way to count. T hink also when they count two for legs on a chicken and also time passage in terms of days. There is a ton of abstraction that we all fall into right from the beginning. The abstraction leap from something like three fingers to the number “3” might be one of the biggest that we rarely acknowledge to the time that it deserves. The proof of that is that a common refrain in math education is “when are students going to stop using their fingers for counting?” My response is “hopefully never”, meaning that there is something unresolved with students that needs attention and time to. The pandemic regrettably proved that education has no interest/idea in shifting the historic purpose of mathematics — practice, perform, and practicality — into something more aligned to the abstract origins and beau