Week in Review: Time Expressions, Debrief Workflows, and Running the Teaching System Properly

31 commits this week. Lower volume, higher concentration.

This was a teaching-systems week.

english-exercises.org

I shipped a new Time Expressions module with 11 exercises and 220 questions.

I also expanded a few other areas:

• Containers & Partitives
• Confusing Verbs
• Impossible Conditionals pack

That sounds like a random list, but it is basically how the content roadmap works in practice: one bigger module, a couple of opportunistic expansions, and a lot of calibration so the exercise bank gets broader without getting sloppy.

Lesson Planning

Most of the interesting work this week lived in lesson-planning.

I added:

• a proper debrief workflow design spec
• a Scribe lesson data helper script
• student onboarding documentation
• a two-file student format across 34 students
• roadmap updates based on recent lessons

This is a bigger deal than it sounds.

For a long time, too much of the teaching state lived in my head. Who struggled with what, which pronunciation issue kept returning, what I promised for next lesson, which homework still mattered. Fine when the roster is small. Not fine once the system starts scaling.

So the repo is getting stricter. More explicit. Less reliant on me remembering everything after six lessons in one day.

Firstly Academy

Firstly only had a couple of commits, but they were useful ones: Scribe now prioritises drilled sentences and teacher cues better in Fluency Gym extraction.

Which is exactly the right kind of boring improvement. It makes the generated practice feel closer to what actually happened in class.

The Real Win

This week the backend of my teaching life got more organised.

Not prettier. Just more trustworthy.

I’ll take trustworthy every time.