![]() I’ve been lucky to meet some amazing and tremendously talented engineers who wanted to make a big difference in the world. While I was teaching, I was paying a contractor to program 10 to 15 hours a week, and once a lot of investors became interested, I raised $2 million and then started hiring a team. Scheur: I’d always been fascinated by computers, and I knew enough to start mocking up how a program could create funny sentences using kids’ interests, and how to deliver automated feedback to students based on their mistakes. Taub: How did you get around the technical parts of building a company at an early stage? That’s when I knew that I wasn’t the only teacher who had this problem. Hundreds of schools started reaching out to me, asking me to build more categories. In 4 weeks, I saw there were 1,500 users on the site. Scheur: Last February, I finished building the first version and shared it with 50 teachers at a local conference. Taub: When did you know you had something? It beat out “Grammar Ninja” and “Writing Beast.” ![]() My class picked the name “NoRedInk” for the program. I thought I could create software to help students practice their specific errors and make the process more manageable.ĭuring my 7th year teaching, I posted an ad on Craigslist and hired an engineer to help me start building something I could use with my students. Even after I made a writing manual for students that contained thousands of these rules, I was still manually circling every single comma error, and I was grading rewrites at 2 am every weekend. “14.6b” spelled out how to use the present tense when writing about literature. “13.4c” explained how to introduce quotes with a colon instead of a comma. I started making copies of every paper I’d graded and creating a taxonomy that addressed each of the misconceptions that were giving my students trouble. I realized that if I was going to help students become stronger writers, I needed to create a better feedback loop. Many would just stare at the red marks, feel guilty for a few minutes, and then throw the paper out, or lose it. And then, when I passed students’ papers back, I realized that they had no idea what to do with the feedback. Even if I spent only 15 minutes per paper, I had more than 42 hours of grading to do every time I gave an assignment. ![]() Jeff Scheur: I taught high school English for 8 years, and my 3rd year, I had close to 170 students. I had a chance to catch up with Jeff recently to hear more about what he has going on, how he got to 10% of the US School System using him, and what 2014 looks like.Īlexander Taub: You started NoRedInk because you saw a major problem in the school system.
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