Virtual Fireside Chat with Author Ted Dintersmith
Join us for NACCE's first Fireside Chat.
Join Us Virtually
Event Details
NACCE's first reading challenge book will be Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You.
In this Fireside chat, you will have the opportunity to be in a conversation with Ted Dintersmith.
Aftermath is a call-to-action to get people to choose different priorities with education that don't start and end with standardized test scores and instead:
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Immersing students in career-connected, real-world learning
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Leaning into AI as a core literacy, not a classroom threat
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Redefining accountability at the state and federal levels versus abstract benchmarks
Speaker Info:
Ted Dintersmith
Ted Dintersmith is an education advocate, author, and filmmaker who has spent the past 15 years working alongside educators to rethink what learning should look like in the modern world. He has visited more than 200 schools across all 50 states, listening to teachers and students and studying approaches that prepare young people for real life beyond tests. His work earned him the NEA Friends of Education Award for his support of educators and public education.
Earlier in his career, Ted earned a PhD in mathematics and became an influential business leader at one of the world’s leading venture-capital firms. There, he carved out a niche investing in math-intensive startups, including companies building the systems that quietly shape daily life, from personalized news feeds and social-media algorithms to logistics optimization and healthcare simulation models. That experience gave him a firsthand look of how modern, revealing math actually operates in the real world, far beyond classrooms.
Ted began traveling the country to understand why students were spending thousands of hours on math yet leaving school unable to reason with data, assess risk, or make confident decisions. What he found was not a lack of effort or intelligence, but an education system optimized for testing rather than understanding.
In his new book, Aftermath (releasing Spring 2026), Ted reframes math for everyone, not just students. He shows how the math we use in life—statistics, probability, estimation, and problem-solving—can unlock curiosity, creativity, and confident decision-making. His mission: to help people of all ages understand and apply the math that truly shapes our world, preparing them for careers and life in the AI era.