Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. We like to think that we're pretty good at math, especially after years of schooling. But every once in a while, a simple ...

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.