She was ready to retire.
Then she met Claude.
This is the story I tell every time someone asks me why I started The Prompt Teacher.
My mentor Debbie has been teaching for over 40 years. Three years ago, the school asked her to stay on for one more year. She said yes. Then they asked again. And again. This year, she'd finally made up her mind: she was done. Retirement, for real this time.
Then I sat her down and showed her what I'd found with Claude — how I was actually using it, day to day, in my classroom.
She turned into a first-year teacher right in front of me.
The excitement, the ideas, the what if we did this energy — it was all back. We kept meeting, kept prompting, kept building things together. And somewhere in all of that, Debbie made a phone call to the school.
She's staying another year. Not because anyone asked her to. Because she needs more time to use Claude in the classroom.
She told me it's a game changer. This is a teacher who has seen every trend, every initiative, every "this will transform education" moment come and go over four decades — and she is genuinely excited about what Claude can do for the world of teaching.
That's the story I tell when someone asks me why I started The Prompt Teacher.
— Beth Ellenburg, The Prompt Teacher