How to create a lesson

A lesson is the container for everything in a session: the sentences you capture, the comments you attach to them, any images, and the tags that decide where it all ends up afterwards.

It behaves like a shared document with a URL of its own. Both of you have it open, and every change is visible in real time — you type, the student sees it, with no save step and no sending anything afterwards.

Making one

Create a new lesson, send the student the share link, and start.

That is genuinely all the setup there is. There is no template to pick and no structure to configure first, which is deliberate — a lesson takes its shape from what actually happened in it, and a pre-built structure mostly guarantees you will spend the first five minutes filling in headings.

What goes in it

In rough order of value:

Sentences. The unit the whole thing is built on. Record one and you get the transcript, the phonetic transcription, a translation and the audio, all on one line, on the student’s screen as it happens.

Capture the sentences the student reached for and could not finish. Those are worth more than anything you introduce, because the motivation is already there.

Comments, for the explanation attached to a sentence — the rule, the nuance, the false friend. Formatting shortcuts keep this fast enough to do live.

Pictures, when the thing under discussion is visual. Adding an image.

Tags, which decide how the sentence is filed and what the student can filter on later in Anki. Tagging.

Build it during, not after

The single biggest difference this makes to your week is that the lesson document is finished when the call ends.

The standard alternative — teach for an hour, then write up notes from memory — costs ten to twenty-five minutes per lesson and loses the specific sentences that mattered, because by the evening you remember the topics and not the wording. At twenty-five lessons a week that is four to ten unpaid hours, which is the largest single inefficiency in online teaching.

Type the sentence the moment it comes up instead. It costs about eight seconds live and roughly two minutes if reconstructed afterwards.

What the student does with it

They keep the URL. It is their record of the session, and unlike a wall of notes it has audio on every sentence, so it is reviewable rather than merely readable.

The habit that makes any of this pay off is opening the next lesson from the previous lesson’s document — two minutes, first thing. Students study what gets checked; notes that are never revisited are correctly identified as optional. That argument in full: lesson notes students actually reuse.

How this differs from a shared doc

A document is a record. It stores things in the order they happened and has no notion of when something should be seen again, which is why a weekly student’s doc becomes forty unopenable pages by month three.

A lesson holds sentences with audio and transcription attached, and those become a review queue. Honest comparison, including where a plain document is genuinely the better choice: Teachee vs a shared Google Doc.