Why I'm Building an App While Teaching Full-Time (Because My Memory is Shot)

Let's be real for a second: to be a good teacher, you need a good memory. You need to be organized. You need to remember what happened with each student, follow up on what you said you would follow up on, and keep 25 different situations organized in your head at the same time.

I stink at all of that.

I love my kids. I love teaching. I love the energy of the classroom and the way 8 and 9-year-olds get genuinely excited about the smallest things. But by 3:15 PM, my brain feels like a Chrome browser with 27 tabs open and three of them are playing music and I can't figure out which ones.

The Problem I Couldn't Ignore

I realized I had a serious problem about two years into teaching full-time.

A student would have a significant behavior at 9:35 AM. I'd tell myself, "I'm definitely calling home about that later." Then the day would happen.

Half the keyboard on a Chromebook would stop working. A student would be in the bathroom for 12 minutes. Another student would tell me their mom was picking them up early because she had a hair appointment. My lesson would go sideways because the projector bulb finally blew after making a weird noise for two months. My day was getting longer, my patience was getting shorter, and it was only 10:20.

By the time I sat down at 3:35 to pull things together, the specific "what" and "why" of that 9:35 behavior was just gone. Sometimes I couldn't even remember which student it was.

The Loop That Kept Repeating

Here's the ugly truth about forgetting: the kids notice.

If there's no phone call home and no follow-up conversation the next morning, the behavior doesn't change. In fact, it usually gets worse. I was stuck in a loop that looked like this:

• Something happens in class
• I tell myself I'll handle it later
• By later, I've forgotten the specifics
• No follow-through happens
• The student learns there are no real consequences
• The behavior escalates

I was frustrated with myself. I knew the other students in the class needed me to handle this better. My classroom management was suffering not because I didn't care, but because I couldn't keep my documentation straight.

Why a Notebook Wasn't the Answer

I tried the sticky notes. Students would ask why I had them all over my desk, which created its own distraction. And the notes I managed to write were too vague to be useful by the end of the day anyway.

I tried the teacher planner. But a planner doesn't live in your pocket when you're walking between desks. You have to stop, go find it, open it, write something, and get back to what you were doing. By then, you've lost the thread.

I needed something that worked at the speed of a 9-year-old's meltdown. I needed to be able to capture a note in three seconds without stopping teaching.

Nothing I found actually did that. So I started building it myself.

What I Built and Why

I'm not a software engineer. I'm a 3rd-grade math and science teacher who learned to code by building something I actually needed.

ShortHand started as a way to fix my own memory problem. Tap a student's name, speak a quick note, done in under five seconds. No stopping the lesson. No digging for a planner. The note is timestamped and saved automatically.

From there it grew into something bigger. The notes started accumulating. Patterns became visible. I could see that certain students struggled most on Monday mornings or during transitions after specials. I could see who hadn't been logged in a week, which usually meant I was unconsciously avoiding a problem instead of addressing it.

And when it came time to write a parent email or a progress update, the AI could take my logged notes and draft something professional and specific. Not a template with blanks. An actual narrative built from the observations I had already made during the school day.

Suddenly I wasn't dreading Friday afternoons. I wasn't sending vague emails built from blurry memories. I had actual documentation.

Why I'm Still Building It While Teaching

I'm a dad. I don't have extra time. The honest answer is that I spend about an hour most evenings working on ShortHand, and I do it because the math makes sense: one hour of building a better system saves ten hours of stress during the week.

Every feature in ShortHand came from a real problem I experienced in my own classroom. The five-second logging. The pattern tracking. The AI-generated parent messages. The communication log that makes IEP meetings easier. None of it was invented by a product team guessing at what teachers need. All of it was built by someone who was in the classroom the next morning testing whether it actually worked.

That's the only way I know how to build something worth using.

If This Sounds Like Your Problem Too

ShortHand isn't built by a tech company in Silicon Valley. It's built in New Jersey by a teacher who just wants his 3rd graders to know that their behavior has real follow-through, and who wants to get home at a reasonable hour.

If you're a teacher who feels like you're constantly dropping the ball on documentation not because you don't care, but because the system isn't built for real classroom life, this was built for exactly that situation.

Try ShortHand for free. No download, no app store, no credit card.

---

Gregory Lebed is a 3rd grade teacher with 20+ years of K-8 experience and a Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) certification. He teaches 3rd grade math and science in New Jersey.