This message comes from the Center for U.S. Voters Abroad Foundation.

If you're a U.S. Citizen living abroad, the Center for U.S. Voters Abroad Turnout Project's online form

will walk you through requesting your ballot in just five minutes.

Visit International Voter.com.

You're listening to Life Kit

from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mary L. Today on the show we're going back to math class. For a lot of

us the math we learned in school felt perplexing or unsettling in some way. Maybe you couldn't get the right

answers or maybe you could but you just wanted to know what are we doing here?

You know I think it's clearer in other lessons in your English class, in your science class, what this subject even is.

And with math, it's not even totally clear for the people learning it, what exactly they're learning.

It's the strange game with no obvious

connection to their lives. That's math teacher Ben Orlin. Now you may have

understood the basics. I have five apples. Cindy gives me two more. How many apples do I have Cindy gives me two more how many apples do I have okay I see the real world implications here

But at some point maybe when you learned about negative numbers or imaginary numbers or the concept of pie.

You're just like, I do not know what these marks mean

and you just start pushing them around the page,

trying to do whatever is happening up on the board.

And it's a scheme of kind of mimicry

and trying to sort of do the dance without being able to hear the music.

It's Ben's mission to help you and his students who have ranged from middle school to high school to college

age see math in a different more approachable way. He's written several books complete with stick figure

...