In primary school, I found maths classes to be tedious.

It was filled with questions like these:

They felt repetitive, dull and lifeless. There was no value I could ascertain from repeating these calculations. I couldn’t see how doing these were a good use of my time. I would rather be at home sleeping, running around with friends, or playing games.

One day, our maths teacher was sick, and we had a replacement teacher. The replacement was actually a new English teacher, but since there were no other math teachers, the principal begged her to fill in, and she decided to give it a go. When she walked in, I sat at my desk, expecting her to give us more tedious questions. Except she didn’t. She walked up on the whiteboard and stood in front of us with a marker in her hand.

She pointed to one of the kids in the front row.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“George.”

“Say George here has these two pizzas.” She began drawing two circles. “And say each pizza has eight slices.” And she drew a line for the cuts. “How many pizza slices does George have?”

“16!” a girl from the back shouted.

“Great! Two times eight slices is sixteen.” She smiled. “And now, let’s say George has a great big party over and invites eleven of his mates over, so there’s 12 people in total. How many pieces does each person get?”

There was a slightly longer pause. “16 over 12,” someone said. “4 over 3!” someone added.

“Fantastic,” beamed the teacher. “Now for a trickier question… what’s the minimum number of extra pizzas George needs to order so he and all his friends at the party get one whole slice each?”

A longer pause. “12?” someone guessed. The teacher shook her head. “Try again.” And after some discussion, we finally arrived at the solution: one.

This memory stuck with me because it was the first time I actually cared about maths. Through telling a story, this teacher got a class of six years olds to care about this world she had created with George and an imaginary party. There was a real problem – dividing the pizza amongst us – and a tangible solution that could be solved with fractions. From that day, I realised that maths had real utility – and it was fun.

Since then, I’ve found that storytelling is a far more powerful tool for teaching information than what meets the eye. We tend to think of storytelling as limited in the realm of fiction writing, but what if its power far exceeds this?

Some of my favourite non-fiction books – Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Outliers: The Story of Success, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance – all have very different subjects. But one thing they all have in common: they all tell great stories. Empire of Pain tells the story of the Sackler family in the opioid epidemic. Outliers explores what makes people exceptional though case studies. Better describes some of the common vices in modern medicine, and what is needed to be a good doctor. The main messages in these books can be distilled down to a few lines. But the power of these books is by telling us stories, making us care, and then giving us the punchline. The thrill of learning something new is heightened by the need to know.

Being a good storyteller is thus not simply a tool for writing novels. It is, rather, a fundamental component of getting a message across, in a way that intrigues your audience.