I can't find it now, but there was a blog article from maybe 15-20 years ago where the author, a math educator, lamented how students seem to put math in a "mat

I can't find it now, but there was a blog article from maybe 15-20 years ago where the author, a math educator, lamented how students seem to put math in a "math box" and completely divorce it from reality. One example given was a word-problem in which a round-trip was involved and the student complained that there was no way to know they had to double the time, but then demonstrated obvious knowledge of how this worked when asked a real-world question.