Here are three mistakes you might see a student make:

These mistakes all have something in common: they’re logical. Each mistake is a generalization of something that students have learned before. The + sign means to add, so we should add across, right? In addition problems the order doesn’t matter, so in subtraction it must not matter either. 8 - 3 = 5, and 3 - 4 = 1, right? When we add, we stack the numbers, shove them to the right, then add, right?

Are These Ready?

One approach is to explain why each of these is a mistake. To explain the place value system, why we add ones to ones and tenths to tenths. To explain why 4 - 3 is different from 3 - 4. I do that. I want my students to understand those things and to see that math is a logical system that makes sense.1

But I’ve always found that approach insufficient. Students aren’t thinking very hard about these problems. They aren’t thinking to themselves, “hmm, 3.2, ok what number is in the ones place and what number is in the tenths place?” The problem is that they’re solving the problem without thinking, relying on the habits they’ve built in the past. My goal isn’t to convince them logically that what they’re doing is wrong. My goal is to get students to slow down and recognize that there’s an extra step they need to take to solve this particular problem.

The approach I’ve taken for each of these three skills is to teach students to ask themselves a quick question. Are these ready? Fractions are ready to be added when they have the same denominator. Digits are ready to be subtracted when the top (or first) number is equal to or more than the bottom (or second) number. Decimals are ready to be added when they have the same number of digits after the decimal. If they aren’t ready, we need to do something else first.

Categorical Atoms

These three skills are examples of what Kris Boulton calls “categorical atoms.”2 A categorical atom is any question that can be answered with a yes or no. There’s a nice approach to teaching skills like these, a sequence of examples called NPPPN. NPPPN means that the sequence begins with a negative example (not ready to be subtracted), then three positive examples, then a negative example. I give students this sequence of examples:

3 - 5: these are not ready to be subtracted

5 - 3: these are ready to be subtracted

9 - 1: these are ready to be subtracted

4 - 4: these are ready to be subtracted

3 - 4: these are not ready to be subtracted

Humans are excellent at recognizing patterns. The goal here is to avoid wordy explanations. Instead, students figure out the pattern through a carefully designed series of examples.

When moving from a negative to a positive example, the goal is to change as little as possible, to highlight the boundary between the non-example and the example. When moving from a positive example to another positive example, the goal is to make a larger change to show the breadth of positive examples.3

Then, I see whether students understood the sequence. I ask students a bunch more questions, in random order. One nice thing about a categorical atom is that it’s easy to check for understanding. Choral response, mini whiteboards, thumbs up/thumbs down, whatever, and I quickly have a sense of whether students can answer the question on their own.

How to Teach It

If I’m going to teach one of these skills, where “are you ready…?” is an atom I want students to understand, I always teach the “are you ready…?” atom a few days before it’s needed.

The NPPPN approach works pretty well, but it’s not perfect. My goal is to teach it, check for understanding, then either teach again or just provide a bit more practice. I do this over a few days, spending as much time as needed. Typically that’s only a few minutes each day. Multiple rounds help to ensure the learning is secure before students need to use this atom as part of a larger procedure. Multiple rounds also give me a chance to help students understand the why: why the ones place and the tenths place need to line up when we add, etc. It’s tough to teach the why and the how at the same time. When I try to teach multiple ideas at the same time, things often get muddled. That’s another benefit of revisiting this idea over multiple days: if I want students to understand the why, revisiting that why multiple times is crucial.

If students are really solid with the “are you ready…?” atom, it just makes everything after it easier. It’s still tough to teach students how to find common denominators, or how to borrow when subtracting, or how to line up the decimals. (If those don’t sound tough to you, please stop by and help me out!) But it’s way tougher to teach those ideas when students keep mindlessly doing something wrong. As I’ve taught this way, I’ve occasionally ended up with frustrated students: they know that the numbers aren’t ready to be added, but they can’t remember what they need to do. “These aren’t ready to be added, help me!” That’s a good problem to have! Students know they need to do something and they’re slowing down to try to figure out what that something is.

When Jane first heard about Memory and Imagination, a rare 1990s documentary about the Library of Congress, she was intrigued. But the Canadian writer in her 30s couldn’t find the movie anywhere — not on streaming services, not on YouTube, not on pirate sites — and her intrigue turned into obsession.

Worried it might become a lost film, Jane decided to scour auction sites, search every library catalog she could think of, and even enlist some of her online acquaintances to find a copy. Her plan was to “share it with other people to help ensure it would be preserved into the future,” as she puts it. Jane knew the perfect tool for the task: a private torrent tracker.

Private trackers are essentially the speakeasies of the online piracy world. Promoted primarily by word of mouth, they rely on secrecy, exclusivity, and strict community rules to shield everything that’s going on behind closed doors from the public’s prying eyes. What unites these communities is that they all use BitTorrent to trade media among like-minded file sharers. But their focuses range widely, from general-purpose trackers with catalogs so broad that they make Netflix look like a niche service to the many specialized communities for categories like Chinese movies, motorsports, visual effects tools, e-learning courses, and Japanese porn. There’s even a private tracker just for Frank Zappa music.

Private trackers are known for massive and meticulously organized catalogs, which they owe to users like Jane, who, like every other pirate I talked to for this story, opted to be identified by a pseudonym due to the terabytes of copyrighted data they’ve been sharing. These are people willing to go the extra mile to find long-forgotten movies, rare concert recordings, or out-of-print books. “Many private tracker users are fully consumed with archive fever,” she says.

At first, Jane had no luck finding a physical copy of that elusive documentary, which includes interviews with Steve Jobs and Julia Child. Nobody was selling it on eBay. Her local public library didn’t have it. Neither did any other public library in North America. And when she finally located a DVD that was available to the public, it was in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina — Egypt’s modern-day re-creation of the ancient library that’s long been synonymous with lost media. “That bowled me over,” Jane says. “This obscure movie I’m looking for is only available in the Library of Alexandria!”

Eventually, Jane found Memory and Imagination for sale on a small online marketplace for historical media. Jane instantly bought a copy and uploaded it. “It looked like a digital rip of a severely degraded VHS tape,” she says. “I was still over the moon [that] I rescued this historically significant documentary.”

Not everyone who uses private trackers shares Jane’s amateur-archivist zeal. Some are simply in it for easy access to pirated movies, TV shows, or other forms of entertainment. “My goal initially was to have a better source for video games,” says Odel, a West Coast-based college student. “I quickly found out that [private trackers] could replace everything else.” Others join trackers in search of a community of like-minded cinephiles or music fans. And as they immerse themselves in a world of illicit media trading that’s largely shielded from public view, many of them seem to catch a peculiar kind of bug.

They painstakingly work their way up the ranks in the trackers they’ve joined and then use their freshly earned social capital to get access to even more exclusive sites, where the same rat race starts all over again. “Exclusivity definitely plays a part,” says Maysay, a private tracker user from Pakistan. “You want to get into those more exclusive ‘elite’ trackers at some point just for the sake of it.”

“There is definitely a constant quest to level up,” says Jane, who maintains active accounts on 14 private trackers.

Among the people I talked to for this story, that’s actually a small number. Some private tracker users maintain dozens of accounts, download terabytes of data, share thousands of torrents at a time, embark on obsessive quests to get their hands on long-lost media, and use automated apps and tools that make everyday piracy seem like child’s play.

In a world where streaming services offer access to countless movies and TV shows for little more than your credit card number, private trackers can seem a bit like a throwback. A nod to a different time, when legal options didn’t really exist and file sharing happened in private chat rooms or on password-protected FTP servers.

“There aren’t many closed doors on the internet,” says Jane, who became interested in joining private trackers after hearing about them from friends. Jane quickly realized that she couldn’t just sign up for the latest and greatest movie trackers, which were only open to vetted users with a history of good behavior on other servers. So she devised a plan to join a more lenient private tracker for audiobooks first and work her way up from there.

Even getting access to that first server came with some hurdles. Private tracker websites rarely have freely accessible sign-up forms. Some only open their doors to new users every few weeks or months, while others use special vetting processes to make sure applicants are a good fit. Sometimes this means that applicants are required to prove they’re in good standing on other trackers. Sometimes they need to take screenshots of their personal media collections to show they’re actually interested in what the tracker they’re applying to is all about. And sometimes there are even actual interviews applicants have to ace before getting their accounts.

The long-defunct private music tracker What.CD used to quiz applicants about audio formats and MP3 encoder settings, and even published a study guide of sorts to help them prepare for it. And Jane’s very first private tracker required her to first join an IRC chatroom, where admins quizzed her about the server’s rules. “It was so stressful! It felt like a job interview,” she says.

Not every private tracker has these kinds of interviews, but like Jane’s first server, most are big on rules. Users are generally required to keep up a certain upload-to-download ratio, with many sites demanding that they contribute as much bandwidth as they consume. (The exact rules and requirements vary, and many trackers also offer some “freeleech” content — files that can be downloaded without negatively impacting a user’s ratio.) Quickly downloading a file without sharing it is also frowned upon, as is the unvetted distribution of invites to outsiders.

Users who fall below certain metrics often find their download privileges curtailed, and especially egregious offenses result in instant bans. “Invite selling is considered to be a major breach of security,” says Odel. Doing so will not only get you kicked from a server, it will also tarnish your reputation elsewhere. “Staff of the tracker you did it on will typically communicate with the staff of some other trackers, which can result in you getting banned from those places as well,” Odel explains.

If you do follow the rules and share generously, you have a chance to work your way up the ranks, which then opens the doors to other trackers. That alone, and the requirement to keep up a healthy upload-to-download ratio, can lead to people downloading and then redistributing (also known as “seeding” in tracker lingo) files just to maintain their stats. “Some places will require you to seed [a certain amount of] terabytes before you get access to a certain rank,” says Odel. “This can result in a lot of downloading of stuff I wouldn’t ever consume otherwise, just to pump up that number.”

Odel estimates that he has downloaded around 500 terabytes of data from the 30 or so private trackers he’s currently active on. In the end, he’s watched very little of it. “Probably less than one percent,” he says.

That discrepancy is not uncommon. “I am seeding over 2,000 torrents, and I have no personal interest in almost any of them,” admits Jane. Maysay tells me that he seeds around 3,000 torrents at any given time and has downloaded things he doesn’t intend to watch “many times.”

“It’s how these sites are built,” Jane explains. “You have to seed things you aren’t interested in consuming to succeed in the tracker economy.” Some private tracker users use automated tools to help them maintain their ratio, like scripts that watch dedicated IRC channels to quickly jump on any newly released torrent, no matter what content it is. This is called “racing” in tracker lingo, and it can help improve one’s ratio; anyone looking to download that file later will get it from those early downloaders. Especially committed users even rent a dedicated seedbox — a private server sitting in some remote data center that is only used for downloading and then seeding torrents.

Being able to download more is only one reason for trying to improve your ratio and standing on private trackers. “I just do it for fun,” Jane says. “It’s kind of like playing a video game and watching your score go up.” And just like with some video games, there is a certain addictive quality to all this. ”Using private trackers reminded me a lot of playing MMORPG games like World of Warcraft or RuneScape where you really have to grind to level up,” Jane says. “It’s slow, tedious, and repetitive. Yet you feel this insatiable compulsion to level up.”

Private BitTorrent trackers emerged soon after BitTorrent itself was created 25 years ago. This was at the height of the file-sharing wars, when Hollywood and the major record labels were taking one peer-to-peer network operator after another to court. Entertainment industry lawsuits resulted in the shutdown of Napster in 2001, Audiogalaxy in 2002, and Kazaa in 2006.

Those closures drove millions of file sharers to embrace BitTorrent, which in turn put torrent sites into the crosshairs of rightsholders and their lawyers. Suprnova, a public torrent site frequented by millions of users, shut down amid legal pressure at the end of 2004. And in 2006, authorities raided The Pirate Bay.

Some torrent site admins responded to the increasing legal pressure by simply pulling up a drawbridge to their piracy communities. Instead of letting just anyone download torrents, they required users to register, and in some cases only admitted new users that had gotten an invite from a trusted community member.

Nobody knows exactly how many private trackers are currently up and running, or how many people use them for their pirated media fix. But while BitTorrent piracy as a whole has declined since the emergence of Netflix, Spotify, and other paid streaming services, private trackers are still going strong.

A live dashboard maintained by a tracker software developer currently lists around 530 private trackers, including some with hundreds of thousands of registered users. One music tracker, listed only as [REDACTED] on this dashboard, is said to host 3.7 million torrents, or works to download. A popular movie tracker included in the list has more than 1 million torrents, which are being traded among just 40,000 registered users.

One of the first notable private trackers was Oink’s Pink Palace, an invite-only music sharing                                 community with a reported 180,000 registered users. Among them was Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor, who told Vulture in 2007 that the site had been “like the world’s greatest record store,” offering access to “pretty much anything you could ever imagine […] in the format you wanted.”

Many private tracker communities meticulously curate catalogs that put publicly accessible piracy sites to shame. “The private tracker experience is a lot better,” says Marvin, a 23-year-old software developer from the Pacific Northwest. Public torrent sites are often ad-ridden and hard to navigate and search, he says. Maysay agrees, telling me that he appreciates private trackers “not just because of the amount of content [available], but also because of the quality, organization, and how well everything is sorted.”

The curation happening in these private communities is very much a group effort. Many private trackers offer their members a chance to request files they want others to upload, complete with bounties (download credits that you would otherwise have to upload other files for) for the first uploader. The rarer the file, the bigger the bounty. And the bigger the bounty, the more frenzied the hunt for that elusive file.

One famous quest for such a bounty unfolded in 2013, when a user of the since-shuttered What.CD server put out a request for “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” a story from Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger that the writer himself had refused to publish. For a long time, the only known copy of “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” resided in Princeton University’s Firestone Library, where visitors could read but not copy the document.

The intrigue — Salinger didn’t publish a single work for the last 45 years of his life — combined with the fact that there clearly was at least one copy out there set off a frenzy among What.CD users, with the bounty reportedly swelling to a massive 6TB. Some came up with schemes to memorize every word of the story while visiting Princeton’s library, while others scoured the Earth for other copies.

A few months later, a What.CD user was ready to claim the bounty. “It took me many weeks of research to find that this book existed and many more weeks to acquire it,” the user wrote in a note accompanying a torrent featuring a total of three unpublished Salinger stories, including “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls.” Someone had apparently published the three stories as part of a book that was printed just 25 times in 1999. Years later, one of those 25 copies showed up on eBay, where the What.CD uploader quickly snagged it.

The story of this unlikely act of renegade archiving quickly made headlines worldwide, and to this day is legendary in the private tracker community. (The uploader of the book was ironically never able to claim their massive bounty, as site admins removed the torrent once it got too much outside attention.) But while few other bounty hunts have gotten that much attention, they do happen.

“Occasionally people will request or ask for something that just isn’t available commercially anymore, or ever, and attach a huge bounty to it,” says Odel. “People will research any potential leads, reach out to random French directors via email, and ultimately come back with nothing. Then, a few years later, somebody will randomly upload whatever was being looked for onto YouTube, with no further explanation.”

Odel told me he doesn’t personally partake in these kinds of media hunts. “But I’ve seen some things which I’d classify as ‘important’ be recovered this way,” he says. “Piracy does happen to be pretty good at preservation.”

UC Berkeley professor Abigail De Kosnik, who has investigated private trackers as part of her research on rogue online archives, agrees. “A great deal of media released today will persist via private servers, much like how a lot of silent films we have today were found as reels stored in people’s attics,” she says. “I think that private torrent trackers, which make possible [to download] many art films, indie films, smaller-budget films, films from many countries, will play a large part in constituting future archives of 20th and 21st century cultural productions.”

Copyright holders, unsurprisingly, often hold less favorable views of the private tracker community. “Private trackers are part of a broader piracy ecosystem,” says Larissa Knapp, executive vice president and chief content protection officer of the Motion Picture Association (MPA). “Content that first appears within a closed community can quickly migrate to streaming sites, cyberlockers, IPTV services, and other unauthorized platforms, significantly amplifying its reach and impact.”

Rightsholder groups have repeatedly gone after private trackers and their administrators with varying levels of success. Oink’s Pink Palace, the popular private music tracker, shut down in 2007 following raids in the Netherlands and the UK. Oink admin Alan Ellis was arrested and charged with conspiracy to defraud as part of the enforcement actions, but was later found not guilty in court. Shuttering the tracker also did little to stop file sharing. Oink was quickly succeeded by What.CD, which remained online for nearly a decade until finally closing down in 2016 following a raid on its data center.

These days, private file sharing communities aren’t as often in the news as they were a decade ago. Part of that is simply a matter of priority. Private trackers often cap the number of registered users; some of the most coveted communities have only 40,000 or fewer active members. Public sites like The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, still attract millions of file sharers, making it easier for commercial copyright enforcers to send out tens of thousands of legal notices to end users at a time — a practice that’s especially common in Europe.

Still, groups like the MPA, and its ACE anti-piracy arm, haven’t given up on going after private file sharing communities and their admins. “Private trackers are not beyond enforcement reach,”                                 Knapp says. “Closed access can make an investigation more difficult, but it does not eliminate the legal or operational exposure for the people who run them. In my years in federal law enforcement, I learned that anonymity is rarely as complete as people believe. A private community is not a safe harbor. Every operation, no matter how closed, still depends on people, hosting and domain services, communications tools, and usually some way to move money. Each of those is a connection, and connections are what investigators follow.”

There’s also the moral questions of engaging in piracy, which don’t get easier to answer when you’re actively sharing thousands of files 24/7. “I am ethically conflicted about piracy,” Jane says. “I often feel guilty about it.” Jane tries to assuage some of her guilt by actively purchasing media she likes.

Others told me a similar version of this, while also stressing that piracy is simply more user-friendly and convenient than legal services. That’s especially true for users in developing countries. “A big part of it for me is accessibility,” says Maysay, whose choices in Pakistan are limited. “There’s a lot of content that simply isn’t easily available legally here.”

The fast-moving copyright battle around AI adds further ambiguity to this debate. “Now that the fastest-growing corner of the knowledge industries relies on mass piracy — copying huge amounts of data that they download for free — I think that the anti-piracy rhetoric of the past quarter-century is looking a bit outdated,” says De Kosnik. “If anything, AI [companies] are anti-archival because they strip away attribution from the creators, whereas private trackers are intensely accurate in providing details about the source material. So, are large corporations to be trusted with archiving our culture?”

Still, some of the users I spoke to were also acutely aware that it’s hard for them to take the moral high road. “It may genuinely hurt smaller creators,” Odel admits. “I’m not a fan of the people who try to advocate for it being moral or anything. I tend to justify my own piracy under the lense of ‘I wouldn’t be watching x otherwise.’ Whether that would be true assuming I was suddenly unable to pirate anything, I do not know.”

Not everyone is as conflicted about using private trackers. “I own it, it’s piracy. I torrent this content because I find it very convenient and don’t want to pay for every audiobook, TV episode, movie, etc.,” says Marvin.

Marvin tells me he originally got into piracy for financial reasons. “It was a habit that started with me growing up poor,” he says. Nowadays, that’s less of an issue for him, and he does spend money on some content, including books and video games.

“But I am a pirate at heart,” Marvin acknowledges. “This is paid content that I am getting for free. I’ve never paid for a subscription to a major streamer, and at this point, I don’t see why I ever would.”

a physical-modeling voice synthesizer with sounds made from simulated airways; try the singing mode

My comment on Terry Pratchett's Study — Hacker News.

Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich: https://chibuikeani.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-price-of-happin...

But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it.

(Original source is his book A Slip of the Keyboard - this linked blog post quotes that bit.)

Tags: hacker-news, terry-pratchett

With the exception of my husband, no one contacts me as often as my children’s school does. There’s the old-school stuff: a folder that comes home in each of their backpacks weekly, filled with flyers and graded work and tests to sign; a binder with a nightly behavior and reading log, also for me to sign. I get texts and emails with the school’s weekly newsletter, updates from the PTA, and, more than anything else, notifications about posts on the various platforms and apps the school uses.

That brings me to the new-school stuff: ClassDojo for one kid. Bloomz for another (except for choir information, which is on ClassDojo). Something called PowerSchool, which is meant to be the district’s hub for grades but also—for some mysterious reason—sends me weekly automated emails telling me that the balance in my daughters’ accounts has fallen below $5. (This makes no sense. For one thing, their school lunch is free. For another, school payments are handled on another platform entirely.)

I’d like to think that, given the volume of information I receive, I have a solid grasp of how my children are faring in school. But I have reason to doubt as much. American parents are prone to overestimating how well their kids are doing in school. According to a recent report from Learning Heroes, a nonprofit whose aim is to help parents develop an accurate understanding of their children’s academic performance, about 88 percent of American parents say their child is performing at or above grade level in reading; 83 percent say the same about math. But in most states, the share of students meeting grade-level expectations in reading or math is less than 50 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics’ most recently available compilation of state scores.

This is the strange state of modern school communication: Although parents have access to an enormous amount of information about what their children are doing in school, many struggle to figure out whether their kids are actually keeping up. Having spent recent weeks chatting with parents and teachers in the hope of gaining better insight into where school-to-parent communication is breaking down, I’ve come to the conclusion that parents are receiving both too much and too little information at the same time.

[Read: A totally unnecessary way to stress parents out]

In my conversations with fellow parents about school messaging, communication overwhelm repeatedly came up. One parent in Rochester, New York, told me that her kids’ school seems to take a saturation approach, bombarding her with information via multiple tools, in hopes that her family will get the message. More than anything, parents complained that schools employ too many apps and online platforms. Joanna Cummings, a mother of four based in Indianapolis, told me that although all of her children go to the same school, she still has four different apps for communicating with teachers, plus a fifth site where certain test scores are posted.

When information is spread and frequently repeated across platforms, it’s hard to know where to look for updates—especially if there’s seemingly little rhyme or reason to what gets announced where. And the sheer volume of communications can make prioritizing difficult. “You have this undifferentiated fire hose of content coming at you from the school, but it’s not stratified in a useful way,” Matthias Schabel, a father of three in Portland, Oregon, told me. Often, important notices are tucked into messages that also contain a lot of fluff—a notification for Pajama Day, a reminder that Chuck E. Cheese is hosting a back-to-school night, an announcement that the district is holding a flower sale at the football game. The paradoxical outcome is that although the school might be sharing essential information with you, you can’t trust that you’ll see it.

Nancy Nayar, a mom of two in Brooklyn, told me that despite the numerous sources of information at her kids’ school—JumpRope and Jupiter for checking on grades and assignments; Google Classroom for daily content; a physical binder with written work; plus many, many papers sent home by folder—she was haunted by the possibility that she had a mistaken impression about her kids’ performance. “In some respects, you think, Well, I don’t have any excuse for not knowing everything that’s going on with my kids’ school,” Nayar said. “But there’s so much about every detail.”

Even streamlined information can be bewildering. Lindsay Meisel, a parent of two in San Francisco, told me that when her son was in first grade a couple of years ago, he fell behind in reading. Initially, she thought that his grades had revealed little reason to worry. Instead of giving traditional letter grades, the school uses a system that evaluates children on a scale from one to four—and when her son got mostly twos and threes, his teacher told her that was normal. When it seemed that her son hadn’t done well on a computer-adaptive test called a Star assessment, which is designed to track a child’s progression toward grade-level expectations, she said she was told to take those numbers with a grain of salt, because lots of younger kids struggle with online testing. That seemed reasonable to her.

Even so, this left Meisel confused about whether she needed to intervene. “The one objective measure that I feel like I can really trust, where he did poorly, you’re saying that actually is not reliable,” Meisel recalled thinking. “But then, what is reliable?” It took a third-party evaluation for Meisel to understand that her son was seriously behind.

This points to a troubling irony: For all of the frustration that parents have with overcommunication from schools, they may not be receiving—or clocking—some of the most crucial pieces of information. “If your kid is bringing home a good grade, you assume that that good grade means your child’s on grade level,” Bibb Hubbard, the founder of Learning Heroes, told me. “That’s inaccurate.”

Misunderstandings about grades are driven in part by rampant grade inflation. As Kelsey Piper recently documented in The Argument, the average GPA of American high schoolers rose from about 2.6 in 1987 to 3.1 in 2019—despite the fact that 12th-grade performance on standardized tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress was stagnant or even falling for much of that period. But grade inflation isn’t the only issue, Hubbard said. After all, grades take into consideration achievements other than mastery of material, including effort, engagement, and assignment completion. The trouble is that schools don’t always share a clear measure of grade-level performance, and even when they do, parents don’t necessarily know what to make of it. They rely on teachers to help them interpret their kids’ scores, but as Hubbard noted, “teachers are not trained or expected to tell parents the whole picture.”

[Jenny Anderson: What happened after a teacher ditched screens]

Meanwhile, many teachers have no choice but to spend their time spamming parents with mass updates. Abby Boruff, a public-school teacher in Des Moines, Iowa, told me that she thinks a lot of teachers would agree that the use of apps for communication is out of control. But that’s not always a problem they are well situated to solve. School tech systems are typically adopted piecemeal. And once they’re in place, they can be hard to remove. “Nobody wants to get rid of the old stuff,” Boruff said. “They want to try new stuff, but we never want to get rid of the stuff that we don’t need anymore.” Plus, individual schools and systems are responsible for communicating a lot of different things, Kristen McQuillan, a former public-school teacher and the executive director of Knowledge Matters, a nonprofit aimed at improving school curricula, told me. Many different parties—the state, the school district, the principal—have a hand in determining what schools ought to be communicating and when.

Different parents also have different preferred ways of receiving information. Catering to all of them necessarily requires duplicating communication. Even trickier is the reality that many parents don’t want to hear bad news about their kid, Boruff said. They can also be hard to reach—or it can be difficult to get them into the school for a sit-down conversation. Data back this up: The share of K–8 parents attending parent-teacher conferences has fallen from 77 percent in 2017 to 57 percent today, according to the most recent data from Learning Heroes. This reluctance or inability to meet in person makes it tough for teachers to convey news about a child falling behind. “If I’m concerned about something,” Boruff said, “that’s not a conversation I want to have on ParentSquare.”

This doesn’t mean that teachers should settle for an easy out. Sometimes, the job requires sharing bad news, and teachers must be willing to deliver it, just as parents must be willing to receive it. Building the mutual trust needed for these challenging conversations may not be something an app can solve. So parents looking for clarity about whether their children are on track may have to dig for it—not in the glut of emails they receive from their kid’s school, but by reaching out to the teacher directly, for a real conversation.

The products aren't good enough to sell people on the costs.

You cannot tell people that you have to listen to the whine of a data center in their backyard for AI overviews and some of the most hilarious deep fake slop in history.

It's not worth it. It just isn't worth it to anyone. And agents aren't real and they might not be being used the way that anyone wants them to yet. All these companies are spending more than they're making on these products. Refrigerators holding blood storage in Europe are being hacked.

The costs are too high. The benefits are not real. And if you connect that to corruption, you're like, in order to impose these costs on me, these CEOs are in the White House shaking Trump's hand, renaming it to the Gulf of America, paying for this ballroom that we don't want. It's obvious crypto-corruption, and it's still slop.

The AI industry will not get out of it until they make better products. Until everyone can see without needing to be convinced, without needing an ad campaign, without any of this stuff that just using these products makes your life better.

— Nilay Patel, The Vergecast: Big Tech lost big in the 2026 election

Tags: nilay-patel, slop, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics