For two years, Auxesis has made an argument that felt, at times, like we were making it alone: that a student can look like they’ve mastered something — fast, fluent, high scores — while the actual thinking never happened. We call this the illusion of mastery. It’s the thing we exist to fight.
This month, two independent education writers walked into a well-funded, fast-growing math platform called Math Academy and came out describing the exact same problem, in almost the exact same words — without ever having heard of us.
What happened
Math Academy markets itself on speed. Math educator Michael Pershan spent a month inside the platform, working through a full course, to see what that speed actually produced. His account, Math Academy: A Mixed Review, is careful and fair, but one line does the most damage: “Math Academy offers direct instruction for procedures, discovery learning for concepts.” In practice, he found, the platform hands you the steps for solving a problem clearly and quickly — and leaves you to construct the why almost entirely on your own, with no one checking whether you actually did.
Pershan’s sharper point is about incentives, not just design. The platform awards experience points for completing exercises, he writes, not for reading the conceptual explanations sitting alongside them: “If the exercises don’t require the concepts, then the concepts only inhibit your progress and kids will drive past them at 75 mph.” A student can hit every target the app measures without ever slowing down for the part where understanding actually forms.
Dan Meyer picked up Pershan’s review and went after the marketing claim itself in a piece titled “It Is Fun to Pretend That Hard Things Are Easy!” He points out a pattern common to platforms that promise to have cracked the code on faster learning: they quietly redefine what “learning” means — not to educators, not to universities, not to the people who eventually have to use the math for something real, just to their own dashboard. Fast completion of exercises gets rebranded as mastery. The gap between the two is where the illusion lives.
Why this matters beyond one platform
Neither Pershan nor Meyer set out to make our argument. They set out to review a product. That’s what makes it useful. When a business built around a critique makes that critique, it’s easy to dismiss as self-interested. When two working educators, with no connection to each other or to us, independently spend real time inside a platform and land on the same conclusion — using almost the same language — that’s a signal the pattern is real, not a marketing angle.
The pattern, stated plainly, and stated by them, not us: speed and fluency are being measured and rewarded. Understanding is not. A system that only measures what’s easy to measure will quietly train students, and the adults watching them, to mistake the measurement for the thing itself.
What we’d ask instead
Auxesis builds around a different question: not “did the student finish,” but “can the student explain it, apply it somewhere new, and still have it a month from now?” We call that the difference between Explain, Apply, and Sustain — the three conditions that have to hold before we call something mastered. A student can pass a platform’s exercise set, by Pershan’s own account, and still fail all three. That gap is not a rounding error. It’s the whole problem.
None of this means adaptive practice tools are worthless — deliberate, well-designed practice has a real place, and Pershan says as much in his review. The problem isn’t that Math Academy exists. It’s that “fast” and “learned” are being treated as the same word, at a moment when a lot of anxious parents are looking for a shortcut and being told, credibly, that one exists.
The reviewers didn’t need us to tell them that. They found it themselves, inside the product, and wrote it down. Our job now is simple: point at what they found, and say it plainly, before “cognitive offloading” gets flattened into a buzzword nobody bothers to define.
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