Do you have access to an Etherpad-server? (Or better yet, can set one up by yourself?)

It allows petty minute tracking of changes and makes it easy to see how the document evolved over time. It has just enough Rich-Text-capabilities to be suitable for an assignment in English class, without too much distraction. And you can simply share a link to your pad with the teacher. As it also tracks authorship, they can even add redactions and commentary.

The way you normally do this for Word documents is Track Changes. Microsoft Word and Libre Office also have a built-in way to compare two documents, in case you didn’t have Track Changes enabled. I assume if they’re asking for document history, they want to see what changed when revising your draft, not in what order you pressed the keys. Although personally I tend to revise back the past part of the document as I’m writing instead of writing multiple drafts and this wouldn’t really work for me. I guess another option is just to use set a timer and save a new version every so often. Maybe there’s a trick you can do with scripting to make copies of your autosave file and then combine those into a format your teacher can understand.

Using Git is out of touch. It’s incredibly unlikely that a language teacher understands Git or cares to learn how to use Git.

It sounds like your teacher probably has a way they expect students to do this, probably Google Docs or Office 365. Both of these have web versions so you could use them even if you’re running Linux.

Besides track changes in word (already mentioned), I save versions of my work docs by appending the date and time to the file name. This makes it easy to confirm of we’re all looking at the same doc.

Example: worddoc_2026-09-08_16-46

Time uses 24 hour clock, so I never guess AM/PM, and it makes sorting really easy.

Nice thing is this works for any document type.

Just save a new copy after each session. Sure, there are more elegant ways to track changes and version history, but if he literally wants progress reports, zip everything up when you send him the final.

I just write text docs in Emacs and use Git for version tracking. If he wants real-time tracking it’s possible that one of the collaboration editors can do that and I might look into it. In the extreme you could videotape yourself working and typing, and maybe saying out loud what you are doing. I think the purpose is to show that you were doing the work yourself rather than prompting an AI.

I guess there are also software screen recorders and maybe there’s a way to log X events (keystrokes and mouse movement) if that approach is ok with both of you.

This might sound stupid but git?