When my son was in first grade, he came home crying, hating math. My wife and I, both engineers, were shocked. Before this, he loved math, demanding complex problems and loving Khan Academy.

How did this happen? The culprit was i-Ready, the district-purchased software. His happiness hinged on whether he had to use it. If he avoided it, he was happy; forced use made him sad; excessive time left him in tears.

I asked other parents, hearing similar stories of kids calling it 'torture' and hiding to avoid it. They learned nothing. As a software engineer, I'm an optimist about educational tools, but i-Ready simply doesn't work.

It assumes students can't read, must be read to slowly, and can't control their learning. This forces them to listen to narration for nearly every minute, not do math. A talented student could do 10 paper problems in the time one i-Ready problem takes to finish talking.

Most kids give up trying to finish quickly, staring at the screen instead. Beyond the narration, it's full of UI bugs like non-focused input boxes and mouse-only number pads, causing physical strain. It claims to adapt but showed no adaptation over years, keeping kids stuck at first-grade math levels.

I encouraged perseverance, but it never delivered. We stopped forcing homework, feeling guilty about the wasted time. The teachers assigned 20 minutes daily, but the content never progressed.

The problems remained identical year after year. The software's core failure is its design: it prioritizes narration over math, wasting precious learning time.