“Messy Maths” and “Dirty Teaching” have been on my wish-list ever since I borrowed and devoured them both cover to cover some time ago, so I was SO excited for this interview! And boy oh boy, did it deliver! My own “math story” is one of proficiency and even enjoyment until one day that changed. I often joke that I stopped liking math once it stopped being edible and we no longer counted M&Ms and observed fractions through eating half of a black and white cookie over and over and over again until the half left was too small to observe. What “really happened” is that I began my schooling “advanced” in math, set at a table with a book and 3 other students to teach myself and continued on that trajectory until moving to a different state before my freshman year of high school. While I began high school in “honors” level math, by my senior year I was in a remedial math class and I simply intuited that I was “not good at math” and “didn’t like it.” Some version of this story is unfortunately true for too many people and it is passed from generation to generation through our own perception of ourselves as “mathematicians” (or not) and our perception of what math even is. And while I began my college math experience with low self-confidence to the point of changing majors when I pulled a D in Math for Elementary Teachers, I finished my last quarter of college–the one I saved that required math course for–with a 98 percent and the realization that a whole lot of this is related to perception–how we view math and our competence in it. This greatly shaped how I “taught” math when I did enter classroom teaching and as a parent with my own children. Had I realized at the time that my musical talent was math in action and my love of nature was math in action and that baking my own black and white cookies was edible math in action, my self confidence would likely have returned a lot sooner. I do not believe there are people who are simply not mathematically inclined; I believe there are people who have not yet recognized where they are mathematically inclined. I love the unique and simple ideas here to implement math practice and observance naturally in the outdoor environment. Children are so inherently mathematical in their thinking and this type of thinking still holds such wonder and excitement for them. It is my hope and my intention as a parent and educator to preserve this.