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.