While it would seem as though I-Ready would be a useful tool for review, re-teaching, and otherwise learning, many students of all grades at Severna Park Middle School have found it very frustrating and counterproductive. We are required to spend a set amount of time on the program (45 minutes for English, 60 for math), per week. It sounds unproblematic, but it is anything but that. Teachers encourage you to break the homework up over the course of the week, but take the 60 minutes for example and divide it into the 7 days of the week. That’s about 8.5 minutes of study per day. How can teachers possibly think that 8.5 minutes per day is enough to retain information? Let’s adjust; maybe do it over the course of 3 days- 20 minutes per day. That sounds great, as 20 minutes is enough time to retain information, but what if students can’t do these assignments 3 days in a row? What if they have to take a break and come back to it? The way that I-Ready teaches, is in a way that the information continues to build on the last thing you learned. If you forget something in between your sessions you could be in pretty bad shape. To this you may say, “just go back to redo last parts.” That there is the very definition of counterproductive. Homework should be straightforward review, not another class session. What if students did the I-Ready all in one day? Let’s talk about it: a Stanford study found that “More than two hours of homework may be counterproductive.” So after one hour of doing I-Ready alone, having to also worry about work for ALL other classes is not an ideal situation for students, as personally I spend anywhere from 2 - 2.5 hours on homework without I-Ready, and added on to that, it’d be 3 - 3.5 hours in front of a screen, which doesn’t take a profoundly intellectual person to realize IS NOT HEALTHY. You can’t count on students to always be able to take breaks in between work, either. Students have a life, and while part of me says that I agree that school should be the #1 priority, the other part, the teenager that I am at heart, is telling me to live out the last 4 years of my childhood. We have sports, clubs, friends, etc. and we will not be expected to perfectly abide by strict and demanding standards from the school. While there are many things I’d like to change about E-Learning, this is undoubtedly first on my list.