Coach Rants #12: Zearn. Note: I’m not treating it like Satan’s creation, but the reason for this background is because many people have despised it so much that it belongs in Coach’s Fire Pile for Abysmal Stuff. Here’s the rant:
Tower of Power is the absolute bane of student existence. Zearn sold itself as a personalized math helper, but instead, it created a psychological torture chamber fueled by toxic perfectionism.
The core issue is that the Tower of Power demands absolute perfection, punishing minor mistakes with extreme frustration. Math education should treat errors as valuable data points and learning opportunities. Instead, Zearn treats a single typo or misclick like a catastrophic failure.
If a student gets a single digit wrong on step four of a complex problem, the program completely erases their progress. It locks them out, forces them into a mandatory remediation loop, and makes them restart the entire tower from scratch. This doesn’t teach math; it teaches anxiety. It transforms students from deep mathematical thinkers into terrified guessers who are more afraid of triggering the system’s penalties than they are focused on learning concepts.
By demanding that every single path through a lesson be flawless, Zearn builds a fragile, frustrated environment. It forces kids to obsess over compliance rather than comprehension, making them hate the subject entirely.
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