Is Edmentum working for your kid? What I learned as a parent using it for middle school
The crumbs of cheddar Goldfish are stuck to my kitchen table leg at 7:12 on a Tuesday, and my 7th grader Jax is slamming his head lightly against the edge of his hand-me-down laptop. “This Edmentum thing is broken,” he mumbles. I lean over, and sure enough, he’s three questions into a 10-question algebra quiz, and the platform froze mid-answer. It wouldn’t let him go back, wouldn’t let him refresh, and his last saved progress was from 20 minutes earlier. I posted in our local homeschool co-op group that night: Is anyone else using Edmentum? I got 47 replies in two hours.
We’d ended up with Edmentum by accident, sort of. We’d spent the first half of the school year working through a popular free math curriculum, but it moved too slow for Jax, who’d already grasped most of the 7th grade concepts back in fifth grade. He spent half his class time drawing Minecraft skeletons in the margins and complaining he was bored. His part-time tutor suggested Edmentum, pointing out that it lets kids test out of whole units if they pass the pre-test, aligns with the state standards Jax would need when he eventually transitions back to public high school, and costs way less than a live tutor for daily practice. I signed up, got the login info, and thought we were set.
The first two weeks were awful. Jax fought me every night about doing math, came away from every session red-faced and frustrated, and his progress was half what the site estimated it should be. Reading through those 47 replies from the co-op group made me feel less alone, but also more confused. Half the respondents said they’d dropped Edmentum after a month, calling it glitchy, boring, and terrible for kids with attention issues. The other half said it was the best platform they’d used for self-paced work. What separated the two groups, it turned out, wasn’t the kid or the subject—it was the small adjustments parents made to how they used it.
The first and biggest tip I got was to find the teacher dashboard. I had no clue when I signed up that I got a separate login as the instructor, not just a parent view of Jax’s account. When I logged in for the first time, I was shocked at how many settings I could change. Edmentum defaults to an 80% mastery requirement to move on to the next lesson, a 10-minute inactivity lock that kicks you out if you stop clicking, and pop-up progress badges that interrupt lessons to celebrate tiny milestones. I knocked the mastery requirement down to 70% for units Jax aces the pre-test on, turned off the inactivity lock completely, and disabled the pop-up badges. That one change cut his frustration in half in the first week.
Next, I started having him split his daily 45 minutes of math into three 15-minute chunks, with a 5-minute break between each to get a drink, stretch, or pet the dog. Before that, he’d sit down for a full 45 minutes, wander off to use the bathroom halfway, and come back to find he’d been locked out and lost all his progress. Splitting into chunks means he finishes one full segment before he takes a break, so no more lost work. I also had him start keeping his old Minecraft spiral notebook next to the laptop for tricky problems. The built-in hints Edmentum provides are almost useless—they just restate a definition he already learned, instead of walking him through how to solve that specific problem. When he hits one of those, we write the problem down in the notebook, work through it step by step on paper, and keep the page to reference later. It’s helped him remember concepts way better than just clicking through the lesson.
We still run into problems, of course. The language arts readings are often dry enough to put anyone to sleep—last week Jax had to get through a 3-page passage on soil conservation that he read three times and still couldn’t summarize, because it was written like an outdated extension pamphlet. When that happens, I just find a 1-page article on the same topic from Smithsonian Kids, have him read that, answer the questions, and mark the original lesson complete in the dashboard. We still get a frozen quiz or a lost assignment about once every two weeks, so I taught Jax to hit the screenshot button every 10 minutes while he’s working. If it freezes, I can just unlock the assignment from my dashboard and he only loses a couple minutes of work, instead of a whole half hour.
What surprises me most is that all the people who hate Edmentum often expect it to do everything: be the teacher, keep the kid engaged, grade, and track progress all on its own. It doesn’t work that way, no screen-based platform does. It’s a tool, not a replacement for a little bit of adult check-in. I spend 5 minutes a night opening my teacher dashboard to see where Jax got stuck, instead of waiting for him to come to me frustrated. That’s 5 minutes, not 5 hours, and it makes all the difference.
Last night, Jax finished his whole unit on linear equations, got an 85% on the unit test, and closed his laptop without slamming it. We still have bad nights, where the platform glitches out and he storms off to his room, and I still sometimes forget to check the dashboard until he’s already frustrated. It’s not the perfect curriculum, and I don’t know if we’ll use it again next year for 8th grade. But when I see another parent post that same question in the co-op group—Is anyone else using Edmentum?—I don’t just say yes or no. I tell them about the dashboard, the 15-minute chunks, the notebook next to the laptop, and the screenshot trick. It works for us, for right now, and that’s enough.
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