> When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours. Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has 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 in Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math?

> His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids’ happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready. If they hadn’t touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears. I started asking around to the other kids’ parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.

Guess what, it’s not that great in online masters programs either. Not like that, it sounds like genuine torture, but Canvas is still nearly the least bare-metal minimum you can get. Why? Because a PDF would be more than adequate, but would not collect revenue. So they have a shell over the PDF that makes you slowly flip the pages, etc. PDFs can even do checkboxes and little text tests and things now, so there is no excuse. You just have to pay and pay, and since kids don’t have money, they have to spiritually suffer instead and learn that the world is out to get them like some Upton Sinclair company town.