Paul GrahamVerified account

Now all this is frustrating enough for me — but I’m a developer. I can figure it out. I know to blame the software and not myself. Imagine all the parents who aren’t tech people. Imagine all the parents in our class who are recent immigrants and have limited English. 6/

Imagine the families navigating these problems on limited devices, or with bad internet connections. Imagine our poor kindergarten teacher who’s been turned into front-line IT support for all these families. 7/

Imagine most of all the kids navigating this glitchy, sloppy software: Drag the letter <laggy UI moves it after finger already lifted> No not THERE! <accidentally makes text tiny by touching invisible resize handle> Why'd it do that?? <app crashes> Daddy, it went away! 8/

Imagine kids having this terrible usability experience and being told: “This is school.” And implicitly: “The frustration, the pointlessness, the brokenness, the indifferent disrespect this software shows for you: this is what school is. “You hate it.” 9/

Many cynics, including me, might say, “Yup, that’s school.” But I know that’s not the kind of classroom my kid’s teacher runs. School so often really _is_ better than that. 10/

The irony is that this remote learning would work far better if the teacher could use non-“educational” software that actually worked — software tested and performance tuned and refined with user experience at the center. You know, consumer software. 11/

The glitchiness of Seesaw — did they even test this on an iPad for 2 minutes?! — is typical of software whose users have no say in the purchase decision. Usability disaster? No problem! If you can rattle off important features to administrators, you can make the sale. 12/

I’m 1000% certain more learning would be occurring if they’d turned the kindergartners loose on some drawing program like Notability or Paper, some well-chosen cognitively rich video game, a good reading-level-appropriate story or two, and a video call over recess. 13/