Hi Karen,
Sorry, I just don't have any lesson/essay data similar to that to try and play around with. Sorting via adminer or phpMyAdmin is actually very simple...just click on a field name and you're done. The number of records shouldn't be a problem as I have done sorts like this with thousands of records. The problem then is that the display of individual "text" fields tends to be truncated to a limited number of characters so if you have a bunch of "extra" data before the actual text, you would not be able to easily see what you need to.
Using the Ad-hoc Database Queries plugin, if you already have it or can install it, is a little more difficult to use, but is probably the easiest way to get usable data. It also makes it possible to do some filtering so that you might be able to get rid of all the "extra" stuff.