21st Century Skills

02/22/2026

Every Sunday night for the past nine years, I’ve sat down at my desk and stared at a blank lesson plan template. Five days, five classes, five periods. Standards to cover, vocabulary to review, materials to prep, activities to sequence, and somewhere in there I have to make sure a room full of teenagers actually cares about what’s happening on Tuesday. It’s the part of teaching that nobody talks about, the part that eats your weekends, and the part that honestly matters the most because a bad plan means a bad week for everyone.

A few months ago, I built something with Claude Code that changed the whole thing. I’m not exaggerating when I say it fundamentally shifted how I think about planning, and I want to walk you through it because I think there’s something in here for anyone who does work that involves repeating complex processes over and over.

Here’s what I built. It’s a system that takes a single JSON config file (basically a structured list of what I want to happen each day of the week) and turns it into a formatted lesson plan document, a set of color-coded Canvas pages for my students to see online, and then delivers everything to the right folder on my Drive. One command. The whole thing takes about three seconds to run.

But the document generation is honestly the least interesting part. The part that changed my life is the archive.

I have over five years of lesson plans sitting on my Drive. 263 lessons, hundreds of resources, worksheets, presentations, all of it. Before this system, that archive was basically a graveyard. I knew the stuff was in there somewhere, but finding last year’s vocabulary quiz for a specific unit or figuring out what I taught during week 6 of Q3 two years ago was a nightmare. I’d dig through folders, open files one at a time, and give up after twenty minutes.

So I built a search engine for it. Every lesson plan I’ve ever written is now indexed in a database with full-text search. I can type in “counterargument” and get back every lesson from every year where I taught counterarguments, which standards I hit, what materials I used, how I sequenced the activities. It’s like having a photographic memory of my entire teaching career.

And that’s where the comparing comes in. When I’m planning a new week, I can pull up last year’s version of that same week and see what worked. Did I spend too many days on that novel? Did I miss a standard that I should have covered earlier? Where did I put the vocabulary review?

The standards tracking is probably my favorite feature, and it’s the one that honestly makes me feel like a better teacher. There are 69 ELA standards I’m supposed to cover in a year. The system tracks which ones I’ve hit and which ones I haven’t. Right now I’m at 52 out of 69, which is 75%, and I can see exactly which standards are still open and which units will close the gaps. Before this, standards tracking was a spreadsheet I updated inconsistently and felt guilty about not maintaining. Now it’s just data that updates automatically every time I generate a plan.

Claude helps with all of it. Not just the coding (although it wrote pretty much every script in the project), but the actual planning. When I’m building a new week, I’ll describe what I want to accomplish and Claude will cross-reference my curriculum data, check what vocabulary is scheduled for that week, look at the school calendar for shortened days or assemblies, and draft the config file. Then I review it, make adjustments, and run the generator. The whole process that used to eat three to four hours of my Sunday takes maybe forty-five minutes now, and the quality is better because I’m spending my time making decisions instead of formatting cells.

I also built custom tools for generating presentations, worksheets, and handouts. Every PowerPoint gets a unique visual design (dark themes, varied layouts, color-coded content) because I got tired of every classroom presentation looking like it came from the same template in 2009. The worksheets auto-format to fit on one page with the right margins and font sizes, which sounds trivial but if you’ve ever spent twenty minutes trying to get an assignment sheet to not spill onto a second page, you know it matters.

The thing I’m most proud of isn’t any individual feature though. It’s the fact that I have more energy for the parts of teaching that actually matter. I’m not staying up until midnight on Sunday fighting with formatting. I’m not losing track of standards. I’m not reinventing the wheel every year because I can search my entire history in seconds. The planning is better, which means the teaching is better, and honestly that’s pretty much the whole point.

If you’re a teacher (or anyone who does repetitive knowledge work), I genuinely think this kind of system is worth exploring. You don’t need to be a programmer. You just need to be clear about what your process is, what data you’re working with, and what the output should look like. Claude handles the rest.

BFG