This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education. The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education.

Students often struggle to connect math with the real world. Word problems—a combination of words, numbers, and mathematical operations—can be a perfect vehicle to take abstract numbers off the page.

Storytelling and mathematics don’t naturally go together. The best way to spark a discussion about a math topic in a classroom can be unpopular with many students: solving word problems. Word problems ...