Two problems keep coming up in staffrooms across the country: the anxiety that many students feel toward mathematics, and a growing sense that lessons have lost touch with everyday life. Plenty of teenagers freeze the moment numbers appear on the board, and others simply cannot see the point of what they are asked to learn. At Maplewood Secondary School, one mathematics teacher decided to change that, which is why visitors are often puzzled to walk past Renée Boudreau's room and find students weighing flour, halving recipes, and arguing about ratios over mixing bowls. Is it a maths class, or is it a cooking lesson? The honest answer is that it is a little of each. Ms. Boudreau hit on an unusual way to tackle both worries at once: she folded real cooking and baking into her ordinary lessons.

The idea grew out of her own time at university. "I dreaded my statistics course and nearly gave it up," said Boudreau. "Then I took a weekend job in a bakery, and suddenly the numbers meant something. Doubling a batch or costing an order made the theory click, and my marks climbed." She brought the same thinking into her classroom last year, and it lifted both her students' confidence and their results. Although the teenagers were keen and their progress was plain to see, she ran into resistance from the principal, Walter Reid, who doubted that time spent cooking had any business in a mathematics course. "Baking is a fine hobby, but I assumed it would only pull students further away from the real work," Reid admitted. It turns out his reaction is a common misconception.