There are three problems I had with word problems in school. Not every problem applied to every word problem.

1. "This is way too vague."

2. "Why would someone buy 35 apples and 23 oranges?"

3. "Why would the person in the problem want to try to figure this problem out? It's completely unrelated to what they were doing."

I get the point was for us to be able to convert information given in a text format into something we can actually solve, but the word problems were usually situations you'd never realistically find yourself in in real life.