When my son was in first grade, he came home from school crying and saying he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was kind of an unexpected shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son loved mathematics. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his mind in the car and during dinner. She loved making flashcards. He would play math games on his tablet for hours unsupervised. Even now, years later in fourth grade, he’s decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra at Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a child like this decided he hated math?
All his suffering was caused by i-Ready, the software product our district purchased for math assignments and testing. During that period my children’s happiness at the end of the school day depended entirely on how much time their school had them spend on i-Ready. If they had not touched i-Ready, they would have been happy. They were unhappy if they were forced to do so. If he had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, he would shed tears. I started asking parents of other kids and I heard similar stories from all of them. His children called it torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid this. None of the parents felt that their children were learning anything from it.
I write software for a living. I expect educational software to revolutionize learning throughout my life, and I am extremely optimistic about its prospects. We have given a lot of educational apps to our kids whenever we found apps that seemed worthwhile. He has had pills since a young age. He loves Khan Academy and has gained a lot from it. I’m glad the kids got Chromebooks at school, they started learning Scratch and they’re using them regularly. I’m not objecting to the concept (or primacy of it) of educational software. I think it has the potential to do a lot of good.
I have no disagreement with the goals of i-Ready. The problem is that the software doesn’t work.
i-Ready assumes that students cannot read, that they must be read to very slowly, that they must hear the same instructions hundreds of times, and that they can never be allowed to have any control over it. As a result, it is not physically possible for a student using i-Ready to receive a reasonable amount of mathematics practice during schooling. The software spends almost all of its time forcing them to listen to statements instead of doing math.
When a problem begins, the computer slowly reads the text on the screen out loud. An animation slowly demonstrates the concept. The student is not allowed to do anything until this is completed. This repeats this for every single problem, even if the problem is similar to the previous problem. For every minute a student actually thinks about math, i-Ready spends 10 minutes reciting the same instructions over and over again. If the student is trying to complete his work quickly, you will see him sitting with glassy eyes for thirty seconds, then clicking click click click frantically for 3 seconds, then sitting with glassy eyes for another thirty seconds in a loop. They spend almost all their time waiting. A talented student can complete 10 equivalent problems on paper in the same time it takes to finish one i-ready problem. Most students give up trying to complete their work quickly because they realize they are forbidden from doing so. Instead they just stare at the screen and try to complete whatever amount of time they need to sit there.
Beyond the can’t-skip repetition, this simple UI is full of bugs and omissions that would instantly cause RSI in adult software. When the question description is complete, the input box is not centered. The child has to click it manually every time. The input box does not allow keyboard input, so instead of typing their answer, they must move the mouse pointer around and click buttons on the on-screen number pad. When the problem requires the student to mark how addition works on a number line, they have to draw those number lines repeatedly with a small track pad. When their answer is accepted, their work is not done. They still have to stretch their little hands over that tiny trackpad, and move the pointer every time they click the “Next” button to advance to the next question.
The software claims to adapt to the student’s abilities. I didn’t notice any optimization the entire time both kids were using it. At home before the school year our children had mastered 3 digit addition and were practicing their multiplication tables. In i-Ready they were stuck figuring out single digit addition on number lines and practicing the strategy of making ten. We asked his teachers to try to reconfigure it to put in more challenging content, but nothing helped. Some simple multiplication problems would appear in the queue for a day, and then they would be gone. They will again hear the computer explaining how to use the number line. The problems they were having at the end of the year were not materially different from the problems they were having at the beginning. The problems they were having in the following year were not materially different from the problems they were having in the previous year. As far as i-Ready is concerned, they have been at the beginning of the first class for many years.
I feel especially guilty about this because I believed the marketing. When they became frustrated with how far all the problems were beyond their abilities, I encouraged them to persevere. I assured them that if they were careful and diligent and put in the time, eventually the software would respond by rewarding them for the learning they wanted. This never happened.
His teacher used to assign 20 minutes of i-Ready math per day as homework, a set amount of time, not a set amount of material, and eventually I couldn’t force myself to do it, seeing how much of his time it was wasting, and how much of his youth was being spent on something that was getting him nothing. As a parent I hoped to enforce the letter of the law on homework as much as possible because I didn’t want to sow the seeds of more conflict about it later, but after several days of watching my kids sit on the couch waiting for me to stop talking at the computer, I gave up and gave up. We didn’t force them to do it anymore. I still feel guilty that I forced them to spend so much time on this, and regret the loss of what we could have done with that time. Unfortunately he had to continue using it in the classroom.
It’s easy as an adult to feel that this is ahistorical, that kids will always be bored or unhappy with school, and that maybe it’s all good for them even if they hate it. If you feel this way, I challenge you to try to recreate this experience for yourself. Find a video on YouTube that bothers you a little, then watch it for 30 seconds. When the 30 seconds are up, using your trackpad, click the pause button, drag the video slider back to the beginning of the video, and then press Play. (It cheats to use any keyboard controls or mouse to do this. It should be a trackpad, preferably a low quality one. You’ll know you’re doing it right if your hands start to cramp.) Do this 30 times in a row. Repeat this every weekday. Repeat this every week for a year. Make sure you use the same video the whole time. Using i-Ready is like that.
When we sent our kids to public school, I thought they’d be at least a little bored. I too was bored in school. It was basically fine. I hoped that the benefits, the exposure to kids from different backgrounds and the social connections with the community, would be worth it, and those aspects have paid off well. When I was in grade school, and bored, what this practically meant for me was that I could finish my work early, then daydream, doodle, or read a book. When there were no demands at school, it didn’t demand my attention, and so I was free with my thoughts.
“Being bored” in school now is a completely different experience than it was when I was a kid. Software enables the imposition of arbitrary rules that no human would have the courage or stupidity to enforce. A teacher, faced with a bored student, would not force them to pay attention to the same lesson 30 times in a row, 5 days a week, during the entire school year. Software can do this easily. A teacher would not demand that all students take the same amount of time to complete an assignment, no matter how well they have mastered the material. Software can do this easily. A teacher paying attention to the class will pay attention to what is working, what is holding their attention, and what is meeting their needs. Software is thoughtless by default, and this allows it to be thoughtlessly cruel.
The most worrying thing about this is how easy it can be to fix most of these problems. Skipping a repetitive animation is not a complicated technique. Someone with the authority to change the code within the company can implement it in the time it takes to read this sentence. The kind of UX issues that make it difficult and absurd to enter your answer have not been tolerated in the web based software industry for decades, because those issues cause you to lose customers and money. Even ADA compliance would make it legally mandatory to fix them. I don’t know why it completely fails in its goal of being adaptive. One possibility is that the software is so poor at receiving user input that students cannot reliably enter answers they know.
When you choose a school or school district for your children, you expect to see their peers, their teachers, their campus, the park they’ll go to after school. You probably didn’t consider that you were choosing their software. The software contracts the district is tied to will have just as big an impact on your child as all the other factors you were paying close attention to. The software will do most of the instructional work. The software will enforce the rules. The software may also be taking up most of their school time. Even if the teachers hate it, they will have no choice. Despite the fact that software is the most flexible invention ever created by humans, no one in the entire school district has the ability to even slightly change the behavior of the software they purchased. It will be easier for you to convince your school district to fire a teacher or even build an entirely new campus than to change one line of JavaScript in the software they have contracted to use. If the software is faulty, your child’s education will suffer, and survival within the district is not possible.
During a year where their only math instruction was primarily i-ready, our kids made no progress. As far as we could tell they had retreated. The problems they were happy to do at the beginning of the year, they can no longer do. During that year, i-Ready became the antithesis of my son’s entire imaginary world. Whenever he depicted spaceships or heroes in his elaborate paintings, the villain he was attacking was always eye-ready. Recognizing that our children would not be able to learn anything from their school math, we enrolled them in Beast Academy after school, which they loved. Beast Academy also gives homework through software, but the software works. They’re happy to do it, at least as happy as you might expect a child to be doing math homework, and it never takes up their time.
Having passed the third grade, I can’t say whether the i-Ready is better at its job or not. I can’t even say whether any of these issues have improved in the last two years. We left the district. We had many reasons to leave, but i-Ready made it an easy choice. Whenever our kids worried about losing their old friends after we left, we consoled them by reminding them that they would never have to touch i-Ready again, and it helped.
<a href