Teaching maths and statistics is a "deeply satisfying" job for Mike Shadbolt.
"You can get a Year 9 student in that's struggling with basic mathematics, but when you see them starting to get it, the brightness comes back into their eyes."
His Year 13 Otumoetai College statistics students sit in the class, each at their desktop computer. The students are analysing figures from a recent political poll that claims National is steaming ahead of Labour.
The class looks into the method of obtaining the data, the number of people polled, the margin of error and the way the data is presented to discover what the poll actually shows.
A sample of 1000 voters was used to create the data but as the class discovers it was gathered by calling landlines, which many people no longer have.