Ted Dintersmith

It's hard to find teachers wanting to enter the profession, so we've made that profession a real torture chamber.

And kids are bored.

And when you look at what we would really love, I mean, don't we want kids who come out of high school just loving to read?

Picking up a book, like your book, and saying, like, I can't put it down.

Yet when you ask these kids, whether it's on a sample study basis or anecdotally when I travel over the country,

They say, no, I don't really like reading.

A lot of kids in high school don't read a book cover to cover.

Well, you think about how many hours.

So your kids, my kids are older, but my kids, when they were in high school, anybody's kids, you know, it's not an elective or a course.

You know, basically all kids in America are spending three to four full-time years on that.

So let's just say 2,500 hours.

Think about what we could do with that 2,500 hours.

I mean, one of the things about my book that's been gratifying, you know, some of the people who got advanced copies send me a note back saying, I

I want to read more of your book, but I can't get it away from my 13-year-old.

You know, like these math ideas, like how you estimate something or what an algorithm is or what does it mean to optimize or how do you think about decisions in a creative and logical way, I mean, they're not graduate school topics.

These are things that get young kids excited about math, and yet schools don't get to it.

And the reason they don't get to it is those are complex, nuanced things that beg for creativity.

that don't lend themselves to multiple choice, one right answer standardized exams.

And so I think it's fair to say it's one of my criticisms is that the story of American education is we teach what's easy to test, not what's important to learn.

Yeah.