The Case for Teaching Math Students Will Actually Use

As a college student majoring in physics, Ted Dintersmith spent six months working through one elaborate math problem—armed only with a thick mathematics reference book. 

Today, he said, students can use AI to solve that same problem in less than a minute. “You could just put your phone over it, snap a picture, and be done.”

Dintersmith, an education advocate, author, and filmmaker, says this illustrates a larger problem: Much of the math taught in American schools is frozen in time, unchanged in more than a century, despite a world transformed by computers and AI. “In schools today we almost never cover the math ideas that are indispensable,” he said. “We spend 2,000 or 3,000 hours on rote math that hardly any adult ever uses.” 

The argument that schools are teaching outdated or boring math isn’t new. But few critics have Dintersmith’s unique combination of exposure to classrooms and real-world application of advanced math. He’s visited more than 200 schools around the country over the last 15 years, studying how educators create meaningful, relevant learning experiences. But before turning his attention to education, he earned a PhD in engineering from Stanford and then developed—and eventually led—a business that manufactured high-speed math processing chips before going into venture capital backing math-intensive technology companies: “I worked, in short, on the math that paved the way to the digital revolution,” he said. 

In Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You, Dintersmith argues that schools should place greater emphasis on the math already defining the world students live in today—as well as the world they’ll navigate in the future as adults. This means topics like probability, statistics, algorithms, game theory, and decision analysis: concepts, he writes, that are “around us all the time, largely shaping what we read, what we watch, and what we end up believing.” 

I spoke with Dintersmith about why schools are still teaching World War II–era math, which concepts matter most today, and how highly relevant math makes a civil society tick.

ANDREW BORYGA: You dedicated your book to students who struggled with math and never experienced the “power of math’s bold ideas.” Why?

TED DINTERSMITH: I travel and visit a large number of schools, and many times when I hear people talk about their experiences with math, they cry—in a bad way. 

It’s never “Math brought me great joy.” It’s “Math did a number on me.” It seems that whenever math comes up in discussions, people talk about how complicated it is, or how boring it was. And I always say, “No, it’s actually really interesting! I promise you can understand it. And not only can you understand it, you need to, because we live in a world where math is all around us and can literally make or break our lives.” 

BORYGA: Why do you think math creates such an emotional response in people? 

DINTERSMITH: Math is hard. But more so, it doesn’t feel relevant anymore. 

People always say things to me like, “I thought I loved math until…” And the “until” is usually some class in high school where math became a sea of abstract symbols and formulas. They ask things like, “When will I ever use it?” And if the teacher is honest, the answer is, “After your last exam, you’re never going to use it again.” And yet, if they get a C-minus or they fail, they have to repeat this math they’re never going to use again if they want a degree. It’s a frustrating cycle. 

BORYGA: In the book, you argue that modern math concepts like statistics, game theory, and algorithms should be front and center in schools. Why?  

DINTERSMITH: I think they cover the landscape of the math that is actually around us. Take predictions, for example. An influential math education policymaker once told me that SAT scores are “highly predictive of success later in life.” But when I started asking questions—Who conducted the study? How was success defined? How strong was the correlation?—it became clear that this person hadn’t understood the math behind it. Every time I hear about a study that tells me something important about my life or society, there’s prediction math behind it. If you understand that math, you know what questions to ask and when to accept, question, or reject a claim.

The same goes for probability and gambling. You can’t watch a sporting event these days without seeing an ad for FanDuel or DraftKings. Online gambling is everywhere, and it’s highly addictive, and a lot of kids get sucked into it. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could use the math they’re learning to get a clearer understanding of the actual likelihood of winning bets on these platforms? That’s probability.

BORYGA: If these topics deserve more attention, are you saying schools should spend less time on traditional subjects like trigonometry or calculus? 

DINTERSMITH: It’s not that those concepts are worthless. It’s that they no longer apply to students’ real lives. Before computers, it was important to know these things. 

Think about the NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, from Hidden Figures. In 1962, before orbiting the Earth for the first time, the astronaut John Glenn trusted Johnson’s ability to do a triple integral more than a computer because she was really good at doing rote math quickly and accurately by hand. But even Johnson knew that within a few years no one would need to do that—and she was right. Schools never got the message. 

We still invest large amounts of money in getting algebra scores higher or getting more kids to take calculus. Sure, a five on the AP Calculus exam is correlated with narrow definitions of success, like first-year college GPA or admission to an elite college. But I don’t think you can find an adult who says, “I’m successful every day because I can factor a polynomial,” or “I’m valuable to my company because I can solve a closed-form integral.” Yet we use that math to rank kids and open or close career paths. That doesn’t make sense.

BORYGA: You argue that teaching more relevant math isn’t just a matter of student engagement—it’s essential to a functioning civil society. That’s a big claim.

DINTERSMITH: When you organize a system around outdated concepts and high-stakes, largely multiple-choice exams, you promote one set of skills and diminish others. The skills you promote are largely “carry out the assignment” skills: Do this, read this, solve this problem. That is what AI does perfectly. So, your primary skill set coming out of school is to carry out tasks an AI model can complete faster than you for $20 a month. We’re already seeing college graduates struggle to get jobs because of this, and it’s going to get worse.

Generation after generation trusts the system to equip them for adult life, then finds that those skills are largely irrelevant. As adults, they deal with situations like trying to afford a first home, or pay off student debt or credit card debt, without really understanding exponential growth or compound interest. You end up with a population that feels left out, resentful, angry, and betrayed. That can spell trouble for democracy.

BORYGA: OK, so how would studying a topic like algorithms in high school help?  

DINTERSMITH: Algorithms are everywhere. Think about the algorithms behind the Facebook News Feed or Netflix recommendations, which shape what we watch and engage with. Wouldn’t it be great if kids coming through school understood how those algorithms work? Maybe they’ll keep falling into rabbit holes, but at least they’ll understand there’s an algorithm behind it that can be predatory. 

Or think about the way we define who won an election. Plurality voting is an algorithm. Requiring a majority and a runoff is an algorithm. Ranked-choice voting is an algorithm. It can be more unifying for civil society, but adults often say it’s confusing. It’s not that confusing—it’s a really interesting algorithm. Math is an important element of civic engagement, yet you never see that connection in math class because the subject is divided into silos: Algebra I, Geometry, Trigonometry, Algebra II, Precalculus, Calculus.

BORYGA: What do you think is lost when math is divided into those silos rather than connected to more subjects in an interdisciplinary way? 

DINTERSMITH: For teachers, math instruction turns into going through micro-tidbit after micro-tidbit. They give a weekly quiz, then a monthly test, and hope kids drill enough to retain the few steps they need to solve the problem.

Contrast that with Finland. I’ve seen teachers put an interesting problem on the board and tell students, “Tomorrow, show as many different ways as you can to solve it, and then we’ll discuss them.” That’s thought-provoking. It invites creativity.

I would love to see the accomplishments of students—and the effectiveness of teachers—judged through portfolios of things students create, invent, carry out, and stick with until they accomplish something they’re proud of. Your portfolio probably shouldn’t look anything like mine. It should be distinctive. It should reflect your personal skills, interests, and passions.

BORYGA: You’re very clear in your book that you don’t blame teachers for these problems. 

DINTERSMITH: I get the spot teachers are in. They’re not the ones saying every kid has to take Algebra II; they’re given those marching orders. I admire teachers who try to make math interesting and relevant.

The system’s priorities are wrong. Kids spend all these hours on math, while almost no adult understands the math that makes or breaks their life, and almost no adult uses the math they studied in those thousands of hours. If math you’re never going to use is half of high-stakes accountability, we’re chasing the wrong goal. 

Take decision analysis, for example. Is it more important to teach a teenager how to think logically through a decision that could cost them their life, or to teach the definition of an arc? A lot of kids who say they hate math suddenly become interested when you say, “We’re going to teach you a methodology for thinking about your most consequential decisions,” such as whether or not to get into a car with someone who has had too much to drink. That kind of instruction can draw them in; it asks them to think through their core values and helps them understand risk and minimize downsides. Decision analysis also restores agency and tells students, “You’re the decision maker.” That’s not only useful for math, that’s useful for life.

BORYGA: That leaves teachers in a difficult position, though. They may agree with you, but they’re still working within the constraints of school curricula. What can they realistically do?

DINTERSMITH: I think a little goes a long way. You can do everything you’re told to do and have kids retain essentially none of it, or you can mix in one day a week of math that is really relevant. 

Would you rather check every box while kids are totally bored, or help them start getting interested in math? So maybe you cover eight of the 10 boxes, but they weren’t going to remember the other two anyway.

BORYGA: What do you think needs to change at a systems level to better prepare students for the world ahead? 

DINTERSMITH: I think it all starts with accountability. If we have accountability wrong, we’re going to get school wrong. We need to step back and ask what we’re going to hold kids and teachers accountable for, and make a strong case that the topics we call important today actually develop the skills and mindsets students need in a world where AI gets better by the day.

We’re already seeing the impact of students jumping through 12, 14, or 16 years of knowledge-worker assignment hoops and finding that nobody wants to hire them at the end of all of that. Educators at every level should be on the leading edge of having this conversation and advocating for the things that will help kids navigate life effectively as machine intelligence advances at a stunning rate.

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.