Alumna Teena Carroll ('08) was recently featured in her university newspaper @ St. Norbert helping her calculus students improve their understanding of calculus by working real-life problems arising out of the current debate on health care reform.

According to the article, she’s encouraging her students to look critically at the data. Taking politics out of the equation, Teena asks her class to model out-of-pocket expenses by comparing two different insurance plans and to look at the raw data of per-capita health care spending in different countries.

Her students are getting a very comprehensive look at ways mathematicians talk about functions and data. And, for her, every math class is motivated to its core by real-world problems because calculus, she says, was developed in response to real-world problems.