The machine finds the evidence. The teacher gives the grade.
Three Gymnasium teachers, two Grundschule, a Berufsschule instructor and two private tutors. Every one of them is doing about twelve unpaid hours a week, and almost none of those hours are teaching.
Sunday. Marking 28 texts, each needing a comment that is more than "good". Then differentiating one worksheet into three levels. Then Elternbriefe. Then, twice a year, the reports — 28 Zeugnisbemerkungen written between 21:00 and midnight, each supposedly individual, all of them written when the teacher is too tired to be individual.
- Producing three difficulty variants of a worksheet from one master
- A rubric first pass: locating and quoting the evidence for each criterion in the student’s text
- Turning the teacher’s own shorthand notes into full report sentences in their register
- Drafting parent emails from bullet points, in the appropriate formality
- Generating practice sets, retrieval quizzes and vocabulary drills
- Building lesson scaffolds against the Rahmenlehrplan
- Admin: seating plans, trip letters, permission tracking, cover notes
- Analysing which questions a class collectively failed, and what that implies
- The grade
- What is going on with a particular child
- What to say to a worried parent
- What this class needs on Tuesday
- The variant generator
- One worksheet in, three out: scaffolded, standard, extension. Same content, different support. This is where the differentiation hours go, and it is pure machinery — you already know what scaffolding looks like, you just do not have time to type it three times.
- The rubric pass
- Your rubric, entered once. Each submission comes back with evidence located against each criterion and no grade attached. Marking time roughly halves and — the part they did not expect — the feedback gets more specific, because the evidence is already quoted and you stop writing "good structure".
- The report assistant
- You write six words about a child. It returns three sentences in the school’s register, built from your notes and nothing else. You edit every one. Nothing is generated about a child that you did not first observe.
- The parent drafter
- Bullets in, appropriate letter out. Every one is sent by the teacher, after reading.
- The question analysis
- Which items the class failed, and what the common wrong answer suggests about the misconception. This changes what gets taught on Tuesday, which is the only output on this list that actually improves teaching.
No grade is ever assigned by the machine, and no student data leaves the room.
The grading line is pedagogical and legal at once: in German schools the grade is the teacher’s, and in most Länder an automated one is straightforwardly not permissible. It is also just correct — the rubric pass finds evidence, and weighing evidence is teaching.
The data line is harder and non-negotiable. Children’s data is Article 9-adjacent, schools have their own DSGVO regimes, and Länder differ on what may touch a US service at all. So: pseudonymisation before anything leaves the device, local processing wherever it will run locally, no names, no dates of birth, no Förderbedarf, no family circumstances. Where a school’s rules prohibit external processing entirely, we build the local version or we build nothing. And nothing is ever generated about a child’s character, potential or home life.
Sunday hours. Marking minutes per set. Report season measured in evenings instead of weeks. And whether the feedback students receive got more specific, which teachers can tell within one cycle.
When the school wants this as a monitoring system — engagement scores, behaviour prediction, comparative dashboards on children. That is not what any of the eight teachers asked for. It is what management occasionally asks for afterwards, and I do not build it.
An afternoon entering your rubric. It pays back in one marking set.
Sunday was marking and differentiation and by the evening I had nothing left for Monday. One worksheet now becomes three levels in the time it used to take to type the first one. The marking pass finds the evidence against my own rubric and quotes it, and then leaves the grade to me, which is both the law and the correct answer. The unexpected thing is that my feedback got more specific, because the evidence is already sitting there and I have stopped writing “good structure” twenty-eight times.
I was sceptical because everything I had been shown involved putting children’s data somewhere I could not see. He pseudonymised everything before it left my laptop and gave me a one-page document I could hand to my Schulleitung, which was the reason I was allowed to use it at all. Zeugnisbemerkungen took two weeks of evenings and now take two afternoons, and each one still starts from six words I wrote about that child myself.
Tell me what your week looks like.
I'll tell you honestly which parts you can hand over — and which you can't.