We taught our own teachers.
The maths teacher almost cried.

St. Paul’s Matric Hr Sec School is a private matric school in Vaniyambadi, Tamil Nadu. About 1,200 students. Two brothers — Nav (me) and Sujal — did our 12th standard there in 2021. We were not the top of the class. We were not the bottom. We were the kids in the second row who were always building something in the back of the notebook.

Five years later, we run an AI lab called 2BFT. We build things, we teach people how to build things, and we run workshops. In March 2026, the school’s principal — Mrs. Josephine — emailed us. She had heard about us from a teacher who had seen our hackathon at Zoho Corporation. She asked: can you come teach our teachers how to use AI? We can’t afford a paid workshop, but we can give you a Saturday.

We said yes. Obviously. We had been waiting for this email.

March 18 2026, a Saturday. We showed up at 8:30 AM with three laptops, a portable projector, and a printout of the lesson plan. Mrs. Josephine had arranged the school library for us. 14 teachers showed up. Maths, Science, English, Tamil, Social Studies, Computer Science.

The morning session was Claude for lesson plans. We opened claude.ai and showed them: type the chapter, the class, the time you have, the slow learners in the back row. Get a 45-minute plan with hooks, examples, and three checkpoints. Tamil, English, Hindi — all the same. The English teacher tried it first.

The English teacher had been writing the same 5-question comprehension passage every week for the last 8 years. She typed the chapter into Claude, asked for a new passage at the same difficulty level, with answer key. Got it in 30 seconds. She laughed out loud and said, “This is unfair to the students.”

The Tamil teacher tried the same trick. Claude wrote a 3-paragraph Tamil comprehension passage on the Thirukkural in 40 seconds. She corrected two words (Claude had used the formal நீங்கள் instead of the classroom நீ). She saved the corrected version to her phone and went on to plan the rest of the term in the next 20 minutes.

Mrs. Valli teaches 9th and 10th standard maths. She has been at St. Paul’s for 18 years. She is the kind of teacher who marks 200 notebooks a week, knows every student’s name, and writes a different set of practice problems for each section because the “fast group” needs to be pushed and the “slow group” needs more time.

We showed her how to make differentiated worksheets. She had 4 sections of 9th standard. For each section, she was making 8 practice problems, twice a week. Total: 64 problems a week. Time: about 6 hours. She had been doing this for years.

We opened Claude and typed: “Here is the chapter on linear equations. Section A has students who can solve one-step equations but not two-step. Section B has students who can do two-step but struggle with word problems. Section C is fast. Give me 8 practice problems per section, 3 levels of difficulty, with answer key.”

Claude took 9 minutes. Mrs. Valli looked at the output for a long time. Then she said quietly: “I could have used this for the last 18 years.”

She did not say anything else for the rest of the morning. After lunch, she came back with her actual chapter list for the next 3 months and we batched them all. She saved every output to her phone.

At 3 PM, when we were packing up, she came over and said: “I am going to cry now. Can I just —” and she did. For about 30 seconds. Then she wiped her eyes and said thank you and walked out.

We did not charge her. We did not charge the school. We did not even charge for the projector rental. We were home by 6 PM and back in Vaniyambadi by 7. Two boys from town, on a Saturday, doing the work we should have been doing all along.

We’re going back to St. Paul’s in August 2026 for a 3-day follow-up. The plan: take the 14 teachers we trained, and have each of them teach 3 more teachers. That’s 42 in August, 126 by December, 378 by March 2027. The school becomes the seed of an AI-trained teaching faculty that doesn’t need us anymore.

We’re also doing this for free at any school in Tamil Nadu that cannot afford a paid workshop. Government schools, aided schools, private schools — if you can’t pay, the answer is yes. Email [email protected].

The constraints are real: 2-3 weeks lead time, a projector, a room, and the teachers’ Saturday. We bring the laptops, the lesson plan, and the patience. Everything else is the school’s job.

This is what 2BFT does. Not because we are good. Because the maths teacher cried, and we are not going to let that be the last time.