My 9 year old has to do reflex math (fact memorization); she wants to get to 100% by the end of the school year. I created a spreadsheet, and started entering her data. I added a linear regression line & explained how it worked. She was immediately suspicious, and began questioning how all the lines worked, and why it’d take so long, etc. I ended up teaching her the intuition for linear regressions, functions, etc. Very enjoyable for both of us.

Why should any of your students give a damn about Adam and his five apples? You have to make it about the students and their interest. And I don't mean that every math problem you give them has to be wrapped in a story, but but the first one for each topic should be, so they understand why this new thing is useful for them.

You can do a ton of cool stuff with maths, including calculating the movements for figures in a computer game, extrapolating the distance to the moon, etc.

And before someone claims I am beeing unrealistic: in my youth I worked with teens from socially complicated backgrounds and helped them to learn for their maths exams, exactly like this. These were kids that in bad moments would pull a knife on you or throw furniture out of the window. This was literally the only way to get them to start caring about the result of a mathematical formula and then they demanded to know more..