In this episode of Social Learning Amplified, host Eric Mazur is joined by Ted Dintersmith, author of the newly released Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That All Schools Must Teach, to make the case that math is the last great frontier of school reform — and why AI is forcing that reckoning to happen now. Together, they explore why math carries such outsized weight in schools despite how little of it adults actually use, and how standardized tests, APs, and college admissions keep outdated curricula locked in place. Dintersmith shares classroom examples of teaching math as a way of thinking rather than a set of memorized procedures, and offers practical advice for parents and teachers ready to act now, rather than wait for the next decade of reform.

‍Eric Mazur: Thank you for joining us today for this episode on Reimagining the Future of Math Education in the Social Learning Amplified podcast series. I'm your host, Eric Mazur, and today is a particularly special day in the world of education. It's the official release day of the book Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That All Schools Must Teach.

Joining us to celebrate this launch is the author himself, Ted Dintersmith. Ted is one of the world's leading advocates for reimagining education. Many of you know him as the executive producer of the acclaimed documentary Most Likely to Succeed, or as the author of the bestseller What Schools Could Be. Ted and I have a long history together. I remember Ted visiting my classroom years ago to see peer instruction in action, and later I was honored to have him feature my students in his documentary.

He has traveled all 50 states, visiting 1,000 schools to find out what truly works, and today he's here to tell us why the way we teach math is the final frontier of educational reform. Ted, welcome back, and happy release day.

Ted Dintersmith: Yeah, it's exciting and great to be here. You've just been inspiring over the years, so I am honored to be with you.

Eric Mazur: Well, so have you, and the honor is really mine. Ted, you've traveled all 50 states and seen incredible innovation, yet you've called math the final frontier of educational reform. Why is this specific subject, math, so resistant to the flip we've seen in other disciplines? And why is now the moment for its aftermath?

Ted Dintersmith: Yeah. Well, I'd make a few points here. Math is not an elective. It's not a one-year thing — for most kids, it's three years, often four years, of high school. It's half the SAT, 25% of the ACT, half the Nation's Report Card, and it largely determines life prospects. So math, we put a lot of weight on, and anytime we read a story about the quality of a school, a district, a state, or a nation, math and reading scores dominate. So it's not a marginal thing — it's a big, important aspect of our education system.

Then it's really simple: we teach math that no one uses. We bury kids in three to four years of high school esoterics that were relevant before computers, but even scientists and engineers don't use today. No one's getting up in the morning saying, "If I could just factor polynomials, my life will be greater," or, "I'm going to use that chain rule 15 times today."

I have a really good math background. I've observed what's going on in schools all over the country, and I think what I've observed in math is what you show so well in physics: we focus on the low-level, easily tested mechanics in schools instead of the big, important ideas. And when you flip that — when you start to say, "Would you like to learn about really interesting ideas?" — people are excited. Kids, really young, can learn these ideas. But instead, what do we do? It's the story of American education: we teach what's easy to test, not what's important to learn. And so I just finally said, "I've got to write this book."

Eric Mazur: I want to get back to that for just a second, because as you were talking, a thought popped up in my head. But first, I want to know a little bit more about the people teaching the math, because you've spent a decade looking at what schools could be. I've heard you say once that math is the one subject that remains stuck in the 19th century. So in your travels, did you find that math teachers want to change, or is the math-to-calculus pipeline a social safety blanket that the system is just too afraid to let go of?

Ted Dintersmith: One of my fears with this book was that I'd get negative reactions from math teachers, because when you say that most of what we do in high school is not just a waste of time, but is largely there to rank and sort kids — and in many cases punish them — I thought math teachers were going to be furious. I thought this would not be a book they liked. It's the opposite, right? I think math teachers would love to teach the ideas that matter, but those ideas that matter aren't on the high-stakes exams.

And when I talk to them — and this isn't every teacher, but it's many, far more than I thought — I think they're exhausted with having to face a question from a kid: "When am I ever going to use this?" And having to tap-dance around that, because kids will ask, "We're spending this week on cotangents? When am I ever going to use a cotangent?" And teachers are very honest, right? I think the honest answer is, once you've taken your last test, you're never going to use that. So yeah, I think they're all in — like, when can we turn this into a course? When can we start bringing in ideas that engage kids, that push them to think critically but also creatively, where they see relevance in their own lives? So that finally, when somebody says, "Why am I learning this?" you could say, "There are these eight reasons why," instead of, "Maybe someday when you're 45."

So I think that's one of the encouraging things I'm finding as I move forward with this book: math teachers — not all, but most — are all in, and would love to do something that injects more purpose into the subject.

Eric Mazur: But we have so many things that keep the system in place, right? There's the AP exam. There are universities and courses that expect students to understand a tangent or a cotangent and have taken calculus. It's a system where many pieces hold each other in place. I've struggled with that myself, but we need to disrupt it somewhere — where is that somewhere? Because in physics, too, I've found so many high school teachers who want to teach more interesting physics, but they realize they'll ultimately get judged by how many of their kids do well on the SATs and APs. How do we disrupt this system?

Ted Dintersmith: Yeah — or are other things disrupting it on our behalf? I think that's what's happening.

Eric Mazur: Because you've been at this for quite a while.

Ted Dintersmith: I've been at this for quite a while, and for a long time I felt like people said, "Yeah, this is really interesting, but this holds us back." We could talk about the different things that have held us back and continue to try to hold us back, but I think what's actually gotten in the way here is, unfortunately, artificial intelligence.

Parents who, 15 years ago, would say, "Yeah, that sounds interesting, but I know what the familiar way looks like, and I think I can work with my kid to get him through this, so let's not do anything different" — well, today, those same kinds of parents — younger, different parents, obviously — are reading a constant message that your kid, who might have jumped through every hoop perfectly and graduated from a top college, may be flat-out unemployable. And they're right to be panicked, right? Because absent the types of things that you do so brilliantly, and that I work so hard to bring — absent things that really do expand creativity and curiosity and get kids to master what they care about — if you're just going through 12, 14, 16 years of school trained to carry out a knowledge-work assignment, employers know they can get that assignment done in 12 seconds for $20 a month, and it'll be better than what most college grads can do. So we are seeing the end of healthy employment prospects for kids trained to just do what they're assigned.

As people begin to realize that, they're saying, "What can we do differently?" I'm not that happy about it, because I think it's happening at warp speed — can we make changes fast enough that lots and lots of kids aren't caught in the crosshairs? That's very unclear. But I think the time is really wide open today for a message that says: why don't we teach science and physics classes in a way that gets kids excited about the field and understanding the ideas? Why don't we do the same for math? What if we focused on the ideas that make or break their lives, in ways that draw them in and make them want to learn — instead of saying, "If you get a slightly better score on your SAT math, we'll give you an iPhone"?

If anyone listening to this wants to take away one important point, it's that there is urgency in making these changes, because the more generations of kids we send into adulthood ill-prepared, the more this faltering democracy crumbles. And I think math is the poster child, because it's half of the high stakes we put on education quality. It's three or four years for every kid. I can't find people who say, "I use it." And I can't find — well, some, but very few — adults who understand what I think are the really important math ideas that are going to determine the future of their lives. We could talk about some of those, but what could be more glaring: I don't remember or use anything I spent three or four years on — 2,500, 3,000 hours on. I don't remember or use anything that largely defined my academic life, and I don't understand the ideas that are going to affect my health decisions, my finance decisions, or the functioning of our democracy.

It's mind-blowing, right? And I think that's why I'm excited about this book, and why I took it on — I think there's a chance to take a bulldozer to that, to open people's eyes to the fact that we can't just keep following the same tired footsteps.

Eric Mazur: I totally agree that there's urgency, but there's been urgency for a long while, and there's been disruption after disruption. And if there's one part of society that resists disruption like no other, it's education. Roughly 600 years ago, Gutenberg invented the printing press, and professors started lecturing from books rather than giving out manuscripts. Video came out, and people continued to lecture even though lectures could be recorded and given that way. Then came the internet, and information became available and problems could be solved online, and people continued to teach the same old skills and ban students from using the internet. Then came the pandemic — naively, I thought this was the disruption that would change things, because it exposed everything that's broken about education. And now there's AI. I'm as hopeful as you are, but I wouldn't be surprised if education finds a way to continue doing what it did before.

Ted Dintersmith: There's what you can control in life and what you can't. And I know that you feel — at least I'll tell you, you should feel — deep satisfaction in having changed so many lives, which is certainly what I try to do too. I say to people it'd be great to see the U.S. education system shift, or to see college admissions officers come to their senses, or to usher out every ludicrous high-stakes accountability exam and replace it with something that makes sense.

But I also say to any given family: you have a choice, right? You can push your kid to do the same old thing, and likely end up with a 25-year-old who's living at home with you. If I've learned anything in 15 years, it's that schools are unbelievably resistant to change. But I think today, at least, they're getting a real push from parents who say, "Wait a minute — the kid down the street was an honors graduate from a top university. Why are they still at home two years later?" And that tends to ripple, and people start to say, "Well, maybe this guy Eric was right — maybe we should focus on ideas instead of memorizing rote formulas." We've also hollowed out kids' sense of purpose, right? And I think math is the absolute best example of that.

Kids trust us, as they go through the school process, to challenge them in ways that actually help them become better adults — to help them move forward in life with some sense of purpose, hope, and optimism. And when you go through years of asking, "When will I ever use this?" and the answer comes back ringing hollow — "Well, trust me, someday you will" — kids figure this out. You're telling me that the purpose of school is to engage in dog-eat-dog competition, to outperform everyone around me, to push myself to the narrow high end of the bell curve on stuff I'm never going to use? You could not attack and erode a sense of purpose more intentionally or more effectively than that. People are starting to realize — later than we'd like — that this whole thing is seriously off track.

Eric Mazur: So I want to get back to your book, because one of the core arguments in Aftermath is that our schools are fundamentally out of touch with the math that the modern world actually needs. Where is the biggest disconnect between what we're testing and what students actually need to thrive?

Ted Dintersmith: Look at the practice questions on the SAT exam — how much does any adult need to be able to do these? I also know quite well that adults aren't succeeding or failing in life because they can't factor x³ − 3x² + 2y. It's just this glorified version of Sudoku that people look at and say, "Well, it's hard, so it must be important." That's a very convenient way for admissions officers, states, and bureaucrats to rank and sort kids, with nobody stepping back to ask, "If we're going to require these kids to spend endless hours on this, does it actually matter?"

I talk about this in my book — my last chapter is on the tragic, ironic consequences of math confusion, so I don't hold back there. I tried to write eight uplifting, glorious chapters about math ideas that can absolutely make or break your life, understandable for kids who are 10, 11, 12 years old, with lots of examples of how they affect you. But I felt I owed it to readers to also say: the people who administer these high-stakes exams and report scores like math scores don't understand math, and the reporters who write these stories have no ability to deal with data and math. So when the people who set policy and the people who write about it blithely say we're facing an absolute catastrophe because eighth-grade math scores declined 1.6% on a set of questions that have nothing to do with any math people actually use, I think: wait a minute. That was actually a fairly modest decline for kids taking a test two years after massive school disruption. There are a million qualifiers that would say "relax" — but instead we get "catastrophe," "disaster." And then, as you know, there's a rush back to basics: more drilling, more worksheets, longer school days, longer school years, double-dose tutoring — everything that has failed for 40 years, let's do more of it. It's enough to make your head explode.

Eric Mazur: That resonates very strongly with me, because I've been rallying about this — it ultimately comes down to testing, and what we're testing: more content and rote memorization than skills. And unfortunately, the College Board, which you mentioned, along with publishers like Pearson and ETS, wields incredible control over these tests. Maybe at some point we should do a documentary about how they're preventing change.

Ted Dintersmith: Yeah.

Eric Mazur: Anyway — I want to go back to your book again, since that's what we're celebrating today. What do you hope to accomplish with it? If you could snap your fingers and change one thing about the high school math experience tomorrow morning, what would that be?

Ted Dintersmith: I feel like the book has a really important role in just pulling back the curtain and saying, "Wait a minute — do we really want to affect the lives of young kids based on this body of math that no one uses?"

Every chapter starts with something I've either seen or done with kids in third to eighth grade. Here's an example: I did this with a school not far from where you are, in Boston, where eighth-grade kids in a social studies class were asked to predict the world's population in the year 2100. I spend a few pages describing that process. In doing this, the kids had to think about a lot of interesting concepts and math principles that bear on how you take a history of estimated population levels and project it forward to 2100. That's creative — that's math at its best, because it draws on math principles but also demands creative, interesting approaches. There's no right or wrong answer; it's not multiple choice. You can't say, "Oh, I know the population in 2100 will be 32.6 billion." But it's my dream that this is what kids would be doing at school — developing transferable skills. I'd rather have them predicting population than dwelling on something they'll never use, and that's the key point.

I visit so many schools where the dynamic in math class — and kids will say this, teachers will explain it — is that students get marked down because they didn't solve a problem the way they were told to. There's logic behind that, because the best advice an SAT tutor gives kids — and families who can afford expensive tutors get this advantage — is: "If you come to a problem that's going to take you a few minutes to figure out, skip it." If your goal is rapid, accurate performance on low-level procedures — which, by the way, is exactly what SAT math rewards, and exactly what computers excel at —

Eric Mazur: I was just going to say, I have my phone for that.

Ted Dintersmith: Yeah — and that's exactly what you end up training kids to do: pattern recognition, memorized few-step procedures. And bingo — some of your kids, unless they're in a family savvy enough to game the system and get a time exemption, race through it and train properly. They end up in that top 3% on the bell curve, and they look good to admissions officers who never step back to ask, "Is our criteria just pushing kids to compete against each other on varying levels of imperfection relative to what a computer does?" And we own that, right?

Eric Mazur: We own that —

Ted Dintersmith: We totally own that — because a kid who comes out of school thinking, "I'm 70% as good as my phone at a bunch of things you don't care about," doesn't get very far in life. Once I say it, people say, "Yeah." All this weight placed on math no one uses, missing the really interesting math ideas that make or break our lives — doesn't that seem like an important problem? Then reflect on the fact that these are the very questions we tell kids, "You have to do well on these if you want prospects for a great life going forward" — and these questions actually amount to a barbed-wire fence holding back a lot of kids. And the numbers on how many kids get held back by math are ugly.

Eric Mazur: So let me end with a short question I'd like to leave our listeners with. If a teacher or a parent picks up Aftermath today, what is the one bold move you hope they take away from the book to change the trajectory of their students — or their children, if they're a parent?

Ted Dintersmith: Yeah. Well, this is really heartening — I'm already getting friends telling me, "I'm really enjoying the book, but every once in a while my 12-year-old grabs it and I can't get it away from them." Believe it or not, this is a book about advanced math — in theory, what we'd consider advanced graduate-school math topics — and 12-year-olds are reading it and liking it.

So if you're a family, use this book to get your kid excited about math and about learning the ideas that matter. If you're involved with a school, give a copy to your principal, or to all of your math teachers, and say, "You may not be able to change everything, but can you introduce aspects of this into how our kids learn?" And everyone in America is in a position to meet with their local state legislator and say, "You've got to read this book. Let's look at some practice questions together — how do you justify making this half of our high-stakes measure? Could you do these? No. Do you ever need to? No. Do you really think we can waste 2,500 hours of our kids' time on something they'll never use, when that time could be spent getting excited about science and math instead?" 2,500 hours is a lot of hours. And when you waste that time in a way that's punishing for many kids and scars many adults, that's on all of us.

So I think there are ways to act at the family level and the school level. And now, as the U.S. Department of Education gets dismantled — which I don't think is necessarily a horrible thing — states have a lot of leeway. I'm talking to a lot of governors, and they're saying, "We need to do this, but tell us what we should do." And collectively, I think we're telling them: this approach is so much better.

Eric Mazur: Ted, it's always a pleasure to catch up, and thank you. Your work is so important, and I suspect Aftermath is going to spark a lot of necessary chaos in faculty meetings this year. I had it on my nightstand while I was reading it, picking it up before going to sleep.

Ted Dintersmith: Nobody would think that a book about math could be a great way to relax at the end of the day.

Eric Mazur: The book that will help me sleep at night.

Ted Dintersmith: It's great — it left me smiling every night.

Eric Mazur: You can find Ted's new book at aftermaththebook.com, all one word, on the Fast Company Press website, on Amazon, and at other bookstores. To find our Social Learning Amplified podcast and more, go to perusall.com/sociallearningamplified. P{lease subscribe to find out about upcoming episodes. I really look forward to welcoming you back for a future episode. I'd like to conclude by thanking our audience for listening and inviting everyone to return for our next episode. On behalf of all our listeners, Ted, thank you for joining us today.

Ted Dintersmith: Excellent. To be continued.

Eric Mazur: Thank you. Yes — Social Learning Amplified is sponsored by Perusall, the social learning platform that motivates students by increasing engagement, driving collaboration, and building community through your favorite course content. To learn more, join us at one of our introductory webinars. Visit perusall.com to learn more and register.