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..