Teaching is the smaller half
of a teacher's working week.
A teacher on twenty contact hours works far more than twenty, and the difference is not mysterious: lessons are planned, activities built, quizzes written and marked, written work marked with comments, reports drafted, parents answered, attendance and homework recorded. In a small school without a written curriculum, the planning is authorship — every lesson from a blank page or last year's notes — and in a school without one system, the admin is spread across a diary, a message thread and a spreadsheet. Those are the two blocks that grow the week, and they are the two that can be changed without changing the teaching.
Read the third column carefully, because it is precise about what changes. Nothing in it says a task disappears. Planning becomes reviewing; building becomes choosing; writing a quiz becomes checking one; drafting a report becomes editing one. The work that remains is the judgement — is this right for this class, is this question fair, is this comment true — and that is the work only the teacher can do.
Authoring becomes reviewing,
and reviewing is faster.
Preparation is the block generation changes most, because most of it is production rather than judgement: turning a learning objective into a lesson sequence, a lesson into activities at three levels, a lesson into an exit quiz, a syllabus into a course outline. On SprintUp these are generated on the relax lane without a meter — on every plan, including the free one — and the teacher's job becomes reading a draft and changing what is wrong for their class rather than writing it. The fast lane, with its credits, buys speed and premium models when a teacher needs the draft now rather than in a few minutes; the generation itself is not what costs.
How much faster reviewing is than authoring depends on three things a school controls. Whether there is a written curriculum, because a generated lesson for "week 4: past simple" is far more usable than one for "English, B1". Whether materials are shared by course, because an edited draft becomes a school asset that the next teacher edits again rather than a private file. And the teacher's own habit: teachers who use generation as a starting point every time get faster at it; teachers who use it occasionally spend the saving on learning the tool again. The first article's assets are what turn a tool into a saving.
It depends on
what you are grading.
Grading is where honest accounting matters most, because the saving depends on the assessment format and a school can choose the format. Quizzes and exit tickets with closed answers are quick to mark and quick to generate; a school that checks understanding with a short quiz at the end of every lesson, generated from the lesson and marked against its answers, has replaced an evening of marking with a few minutes of checking, and gained daily data on what landed. Written work — essays, extended answers, speaking — is not marked by a platform, and should not be. Generation can draft a comment from a rubric for the teacher to edit; the mark and the judgement stay with the person who knows the student.
So the grading saving is really a design decision. A school that moves routine checking of understanding onto short generated quizzes, and keeps written and spoken assessment for the moments that need a teacher's judgement, marks far less by hand and knows more about its students. A school that keeps every assessment as a hand-marked worksheet saves little on grading, whatever platform it uses. The agile-teaching guides on exit tickets and formative checks are the classroom practice behind this; this article is the workload arithmetic.
Judgement, presence,
and the things a school still has to decide.
The platform does not know your class. It does not know that Tuesday's lesson lost half the room at the second example, that one student needs the harder version and another the easier, that a comment which is accurate would be unkind to this particular child this week. It does not teach the lesson, and it does not make the school's decisions: whether there is a written curriculum, whether assessment is designed for quick checking or hand marking, whether teachers are given four preparations or seven. A school that buys a platform and changes none of those will see teachers use generation a little and save a little. A school that makes the decisions will see the shape of the work change.
Admin is the one block where the platform's contribution does not depend on teaching practice: attendance, homework, messages and reports in one campus and one portal, rather than spread across tools, remove the re-keying and the searching that fill the edges of a teacher's day. It is unglamorous and it is real, and it is the part the second question in the survey — hours on admin — will pick up first.
One school, one term, self-reported,
and ours.
In a one-term pilot at Intellect Academy — our sister school — teachers reported that lesson preparation and grading time fell by roughly half.
Everything that qualifies that sentence is as important as the sentence. It is one school, an English-language school for children and teenagers, owned by the same company as SprintUp. It is one term. It is self-reported: teachers were asked at the end of the term how their weekly preparation and grading time compared with the term before, and there were no diaries or timesheets. It is not a controlled study, and it is not a promise of what your school will see; what your school sees will depend on the three things in the preparation section and the design decision in the grading section, which were all in place at that school because it is ours.
It is the reason the platform was built the way it was, and it is the result we are now checking against schools that are not ours, using the survey in the next article. If your school runs the same survey, we would like to see the number, whatever it shows, and we will publish what we find whether or not it matches.