Shop Math Blues

The past couple of weeks I have been teaching shop math. This is a subject that the students do not get very excited about, and I don't get really excited about teaching it. The students will sit there and act like they understand it, but judging from the classwork, they don't. It is hard for me to understand how students who are going to the workforce can have such a problem with the most basic of math problems. How do you teach the boring subjects in a way that keeps the students engaged and interrested?

This is where the "what would I do differently" comes in. I think the key to almost everything that I teach is giving them a real world application. I can do this better with lab time, and more variety in my teaching. I need to gather more materials and find some unique solutions.