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answers:
Billandhiscats say: Have you ever considered that perhaps they are right ? It could be many things.
Perhaps you ramble on. Perhaps your voice drones on a bit (a lot) and they lose interest. Smitten with one of these unfortunate droning complaints, its almost impossible I imagine to maintain the attention of a full class.
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d00ney say: Are you simply explaining how to solve? Their action seems to indicate to me that they have no interest in the subject. Your first task I suggest is to find out what does grab them if indeed you are teaching them maths to help them understand and enhance their lives.
Are you just boring, teaching maths like a salesman, same spiel over and over again? I am a bore myself, when I try and explain things people find they have much better things to do than to listen to me. You either have to have the strength of character that they dare not do anything but what you ask or the charisma that they want to do what you ask. However, these attributes are usually the result of years of hard work.
Once you have discovered the buttons to press for a particular group, you can then start presenting them with life situation problems. So far so good but presenting and understanding the problem in 'math talk' ie an equation can be a big stumbling block, like up to now you have been speaking English and now you are speaking unintelligible gibberish.
If that is the case then your job or preferably the job of the tutor before you is to enable them to 'get it'. I would suggest then that when you first start your course you get them to show off in class discussion their knowledge or otherwise of math talk, just beware of being side tracked. You can then set work to find out who is on side and who is clueless.