There’s a thing that happens when a ninth grader stands up to present. They’re nervous. Their slides were clearly cobbled together at 11pm the night before. They keep glancing at me to see if it’s going okay.
And here’s what I’m doing, as the teacher whose job is to evaluate them: I’m tracking the rubric. I’m tracking content accuracy. I’m tracking how the rest of the class is responding. I’m tracking time, because there are five more presenters after this one. I’m scribbling quotes I’ll need later for feedback.
And somewhere in all of that, I’m also trying to actually watch the kid in front of me — to be the audience this nervous fifteen-year-old deserves.
If you’ve ever graded student presentations, you already know how that math works out.
Something Has to Give
You can’t give all of those things your best attention at once. Something always gives.
Sometimes what gives is the room — the ability to scan and notice that three students in the back have stopped following, or that the presenter just made a brave choice that deserves a nod. Sometimes what gives is the depth of the feedback, because you’re paraphrasing in your head as fast as you can write. By presenter five, what gives is your patience, because the cognitive load of “watch carefully + transcribe carefully + manage the queue” has fully drained your tank.
This isn’t a teacher problem. It’s a structural one. Asking one human brain to be both audience and stenographer at the same time — multiple presenters in a row, several times a year — that’s just not a fair ask of the equipment.
I’ve been teaching for a while, and I’ve gotten better at it. I know how to skim-and-nod, how to write shorthand, how to manage the energy in a room while also keeping tabs on a rubric. But “better at managing the impossibility” is not the same as actually solving it. Every presentation season, some combination of the same things break: my notes are thin, my feedback is rushed, or I arrive at the last presenter running on fumes.
A Small, Kind of Wild Idea
About a year ago, I started using an AI note-taking app during staff meetings at school. It was nice. It picked up speech, cleaned up what was said, kept me from frantically typing while colleagues talked. I could actually follow the conversation instead of transcribing it.
And then one day I had the small but kind of wild idea to use it during a student presentation.
I sat in the back of the room. I didn’t write anything. I just watched her present.
For the first time in a long time, I had my attention back.
Fully in the Room
I could watch her hands. I could catch the moment her voice steadied halfway through — that specific beat when a nervous presenter stops surviving and starts actually talking. I could glance at the rest of the class and see how her argument was landing. I could be the audience she deserved.
And when she finished, my notes were already there — the quotes I needed for the rubric, the points she’d made, the parts I’d want to come back to.
That was the aha. Not “wow, AI is cool.” More like — oh, this is what it feels like to be fully in the room.
I wanted that experience to be the default, not a happy accident I’d stumbled into. I wanted a tool built around the way teachers actually work — hallway conversations, parent conferences, student presentations, advisory check-ins, the quiet department meetings where the principal speaks in long careful paragraphs. Something simple. Something fast. Something that fit a school day.
So I built it.
The Lesson I Should Have Learned in High School
Building MendNotes was its own education. At one point I spent hours banging my head against a wall. I was using AI to help me code, and I kept asking it variations of the same question, hoping for a different answer. The same broken approach, over and over.
Eventually I asked the question I should have asked at the start: was there another way to do this entirely? There was. An hour later, the problem I’d been stuck on was gone.
That’s a moment every teacher has lived from both sides. We’ve watched a student grind on the wrong approach for forty-five minutes before they finally raise a hand. And we’ve been that student ourselves — sitting alone with the problem, assuming we should just figure it out, asking for help only after the wall has already won.
The biggest unlock of building MendNotes wasn’t a technical one. It was learning to ask sooner.
What MendNotes Actually Does
MendNotes records and transcribes across multiple languages, which matters in any classroom or meeting where everyone isn’t working in the same first language. That alone is useful.
But the part that changed how I work is this: it lets you hand it a rubric or a template, and instead of leaving you to copy-paste later, it places what was actually said directly into the right rubric criteria or the right section of your template. Attach the agenda, the slides, the spreadsheet someone shared, and they become part of the final document.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Who’s it for? Anyone who’s tired of choosing between being present and capturing what’s said. My colleagues who run department meetings while juggling forty other things. Teachers grading a row of student presentations who’d rather be a real audience for each one.
I built MendNotes so the work of paying attention to the people in front of us doesn’t have to compete with the work of writing things down.
Takeaway for Teachers
You don’t have to build an app to get some of this back. If you have any AI note-taking tool available to you — Otter, Fireflies, or even a phone recording with a transcript — try it once during a low-stakes moment: a team meeting, a parent conference, an advisory check-in.
Don’t use it to record students without their knowledge. Be transparent. But in the right context, try putting the pen down for thirty minutes and just being in the room.
Notice what you see when you’re not also trying to write everything down.
It turns out — there’s a tool for that now. And the tool isn’t really about the technology. It’s about giving yourself permission to be present.
David Jacobson is a high school history teacher. He writes about AI, education, and the messy intersection of the two at shouldiuse.ai.
