Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans | Hacker News Reader

Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

tampabay.com

80 pointsTextarcana37 comments

This is textbook PR, literally from the first word. The headline is crafted specifically to engender resentment and outrage.

The intention is to reinforce the counterfactual narrative that teachers in the US are overpaid, which is needed to depress opposition to the looting of public school systems.

Now, a market for lesson plans is interesting - and I'm much happier with money going to entrepreneurial teachers actually creating content that might otherwise end up in the pockets of the Blackstone Group or Holtzbrinck - but the real point of this article has more to do with parochial politics.

Agreed, this is the big publishers trying to maintain a monopoly.

Could you point me to what you mean, or how you found that meaning here? I grant that I probably bring my own biases to this interpretation, but the article made me think, "teachers now have to spend their own salaries on teaching material because districts only buy lousy, overpriced stuff (if that) from textbook publishers. Worse yet, the jerks feel the need to attack the teachers who are sharing their material, as if $40k p.a. entitled them to 168 hours of their employees' time each week."

Starting off with the title of "Millionaire" would definitely annoy people.

Ahhh, so it's PR for people who only look at the title. Thank you; I totally missed that, but you're quite right about it. (This from the guy who misses important information in emails because why would I read the subject line if I'm reading the whole message?)

Man, I don't get why Teachers stress so much on lesson plans.

I was a high school teacher for about a decade and after the first three years, it doesn't take long or difficult to have lesson plans available.

If you want ideas, the school district often has a crap load of them. And if you are teaching a standardized course (like Algebra or Geometry) you are essentially provided lesson plans for every day.

The website is an interesting idea, but it won't make a bunch of people millionaires. It will make 2 or 3 teachers millionaires, with most people who contributed probably losing money for the amount of time invested in creating these lesson plans.

Really, the school districts biggest waste of resources are their teachers. You could easily open source all the teachers lesson plans for the district, then you could freely pick and choose from anyone in your district.

Also, you could do away with those crazy expensive textbooks. Get every kid a $50 android tablet and get a team of teachers to come up with an open source version.

It would take them a few weeks over the summer if you are dealing with experienced teachers.

Then, you update the textbook every summer and the students download the latest version in August.

The school district would save insane amounts of money.

But, they won't do that because the publishers and administrators have corrupted the textbook buying process to a maddening degree. So sad.

The other "advantage" to centralized textbook buying is the opportunity to slip in that sweet sweet non-educational indoctrination. Hard to universally indoctrinate when the local community is doing their own thing.

Your profile notes:

> Owner/ Founder: Making-The-Grade Private Learning (Private Tutoring Services).

Your belief that there is nothing more to teaching than a lesson plan - "you could freely pick and choose from anyone in your district" - doesn't inspire confidence in the services you offer.

You also note that you're a Wordpress (sic) contractor. WordPress (note the capitalized P) is open source. Do you also believe that you could freely pick and choose from anyone (i.e. anybody without prior training or experience) to do WordPress development?

I know this is super late, but I will respond as I just saw it.

I have been an educator for over a decade, and lesson plans are very low on the list of what makes someone a good or great teacher/educator.

Teaching successfully is a lot of things, but for me it is a presentation. Making an interesting presentation and guiding students through a course correctly is the true skill.

Lesson plans are mostly about inserting industry language and cool sounding bullet points into pdfs so that your administrator will be impressed. They are really useful to inexperienced teachers, but are largely an after thought for many great experienced teachers. When you open source them to people in your district, it would be easy for other teachers to get ideas from them and allow them to actually be useful for even the most experienced teachers.

You clearly didn't understand my comment, so please enlighten me on what your theory of teaching and education is and the role that lesson plans play in all of it.

Your question, which was probably rhetorical, about Wordpress (note the uncapitalized p) doesn't make any sense. If you want an honest debate, rephrase it.

This reminds me of what Michelle Rhee wrote in her book 'Radical':

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Imagine a third-grade teacher whose class is working on fractions. She opens up her laptop that the school has provided. She ventures into a teacher portal that the district has set up to assist educators. The teacher types “adding fractions” into the search engine. Up pop links to lesson plans that various teachers in the district have used to teach the skill of adding fractions. They are sorted by grade level. Each lesson is rated by a certain number of stars, ratings other teachers have given the plan based on how well it was written and how well it worked in their classroom. There are also links to videos of master teachers presenting lessons on adding fractions. In these videos teachers can hear narration by the master teacher, who is explaining what happened in the room, and why she did what she did. There’s also a message board that teachers can use to comment on the video and share ideas.

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When I read this, I thought "Yes! Stack Overflow for lesson plans"

Glad teachers are finding a way to make some additional money especially given how much time they spend on lesson plans. The licensing aspect seems interesting and potentially problematic, but I don't see why the school districts couldn't get into this too and do some sort of revenue share with the teachers (ignoring the bureaucracy of actually setting it up). A more "open source" version of this would be nice too but then you get into the same kinds of funding issues that open source projects have. Seems like it would be good to have teachers contributing back improvements though too. Does anybody know of anything like this?

I don't see the downside here. Being able to sell lesson plans would be a nice little bonus to often underpaid teachers. It would have the upside of having teachers put in a little more work in developing their lesson plans if they think they can sell them. Other teachers would be able to benefit greatly from purchasing other lesson plans and saving time and effort.

I don't think it would harm the "traditional collaborative atmosphere of schools". Creating an exchange, even with the option of payment would just improve it

>I don't see the downside here.

The new thing here isn't lesson plans for sale, it's a marketplace with small vendors. So this isn't a new downside, but sponsored content is a continual worry.

A train carrying delicious Pepsi products is traveling from the Pepsi plant in Pepsi-town to the Pepsi distribution center in Pepsi-city. What is your favorite beverage?

Imported sparkling glacial water only, sorry.

As a parent, I dread seeing worksheets come home with my kids that are obviously downloaded from the web. It's mostly been busy work dressed up with clip-art, or just totally unvetted by the teacher (e.g. "fun" word puzzles with obscure words). There were a couple of history worksheets that made sense to share, but the documents were apparently un-editable, so about 2/3 of the questions were blacked out before it was copied. Which is fine, I guess, but seems not exactly optimal.

I'll be curmudgeonly ... can someone open-source lesson plans so the community could work to improve them and they would be free? Teachers shouldn't have to be paying out of pocket for this stuff.

Or does such a thing exist?

I guess I'm torn: I like that teachers are seeing compensation by selling their lesson plans, hate that other teachers have to pay.

(I'm personally working on a site to eventually provide free primers to elementary school age children.)

Ideally we'd abandon this weird psuedo-capitalist idea of education and just convince our government that education is the best investment a country can make.

An educated populace will devise better defense technologies and strategies. An educated populace will create more efficient means of production. An educated populace will strategize better trade deals. An educated populace will create more cultural icons that attract foreign tourists.

In other words, yes, open-source the lesson plans, and increase the education budget by 500%.

Assuming you're talking about the US, we already spend more per student than pretty much anybody else. I'd argue we spend plenty, but if we're going to inflate education spending, why stop at 500%? Why not 5000%? We can print as much money as we need!

Open Education Resources (OER) is already a thing - but access is so fragmented between different websites and organizations that I've never found it particularly useful.

Additionally, it often takes as much time to find & modify OER to fit my classroom needs as it does to simply make it from scratch on my own.

Throwing money at the problem isn't necessarily going to help. Tons of poor school districts have gotten major cash infusions and produced nothing to show for it. The money needs to be spent efficiently. Power needs to be taken away from administrators and given back to teachers. Also, bad teachers need to be fired.

Why do bad teachers exist? Why do we have tyrranical, shitty administrations?

Giving a million dollars to a homeless drug addict would kill him within the week. You don't solve the problem by throwing money at it, now.

I said increase the education budget. That's not just money to schools, that's money to education research, schools, teachers, after school programs, parent outreach, and all the other weird little things people don't think about when they think about education. It would shift our country's cultural and political policy towards education - if teachers are pulling 120k salaries, the expectations for their performance would be higher. More people would seek out the extra difficult training to become a teacher because the rewards are worth it, much like people are willing to spend 10 years slaving through medical school for a prominent, well-respected, highly paid job that involves helping people.

Right now the only people that teach are the genuinely good people that are willing to take 24k/year salaries minus personal expenses on classroom supplies, or yea, the shitty people who couldn't figure out what else to do.

My experience is that this stuff is used piecemeal instead of as a main curriculum- maybe you need a differentiating activity for a few students, or something for a weird chunk of time caused by testing or something.

You used to just grab this type of stuff out of the 'resource room' every school has, but between the combination of Common Core making old material 'obsolete' and the big educational publishers locking down more material through stringent copyright assertion it's become more necessary to look elsewhere.

Is it wrong for corporations to look at our nation's school-children and see a "market"?

Yeah, it is.

As a teacher, I find it absurd how much redundant labor takes place in classrooms. When I was just starting out I'd find myself making something simple - like a comprehension quiz for 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - and just swearing under my breath. What I was doing must have been done thousands of times over the years. The silo'ing of curriculum in filing cabinets and hard drives helps no one.

This is likewise true for assessment. Another HN member and I have been developing an assessment creation tool that makes use of a library of shared assessment elements. Still really early in the development process, but it takes aim at this exact issue (while, hopefully, building in some additional benefits: save time, easily generate multiple versions of the assessment for different skill levels, iterative improvement with use, etc). If it comes together, we're intending to branch into general purpose curriculum and lesson performance tools as well.

it is hard getting people to work for free

The work is already being done. It's just not being shared.

I'm not sure you are on firm ground here legally. You can't be selling work you have done for your employer without getting something drawn up that allows that.

This might be different from district to district, though it's certainly a concern. I know that my last school district not only accepted, but help facilitate, my taking digitally created curriculum to another district when I changed jobs.

Edit: I also wondering if sharing vs selling makes a legal difference? If teachers cannot legally share curriculum materials then every single teacher in this country is breaking the law.

Put them on github?

>Some legal experts argue that the resources teachers produce while working for a school district may actually be the property of the school district.

I think as this industry grows, this becomes a huge issue for retention. Some teachers may decide to leave the profession and produce content full time if they can make more money (which isn't hard in some states).

I doubt it can happen, but I believe we would be well served to more clearly and firmly limit copyright within the classroom setting. I understand that publishers need to protect their investment, but teacher actively and regularly break the law in preparing curriculum for their classes.

Andrew at Mixergy did an awesome podcast on a similar site just recently. I highly recommend listening to it, the co-founders are incredible.

https://mixergy.com/interviews/flipped-lifestyle-with-shane-...

I've always felt that Teacherspayteachers is interesting, but it can’t be a general purpose curriculum tool. The marketplace model also distorts (in my mind) the incentives for sharing while limiting buyers/users to the infrequent, desperate and/or inexperienced. The relationship between teachers is purely transactional, so there is no collaborative development or improvement of the content over time. Likewise, it is reliant on discrete documents, which I find inflexible. This inflexibility might not matter if you're working with young kids and just need a fun activity/game - but (as a high school teacher) it is a significant hinderance to using this platform on a regular basis.

All that said, sincere props to Paul Edelman for developing a strong community around the site.

I say great for the teachers who found a way to make some well deserved extra money for all of their hard work.

The thing that makes no sense is the need for it in the first place. The constant changing of books for the curriculum forces everyone to reinvent the wheel for their lesson plans. So much wasted time and energy that the teachers could be spending actually helping children and being more satisfied. This isn't cutting edge ML research at MIT, it is helping 3rd graders learn about planets, etc.

Why isn't this done at the state level Department of Education? Here is the playbook, follow it and add/adjust as you need to based on your students. Huge time and money savings for all. This is easy to solve with some political will and give-a-shit.

It's mostly driven by publishers who want to sell books every year instead of every decade. Add some academics looking to justify their existence plus upper administrators who are given big salaries to 'do something' to 'improve' education and you soon have a system that's very willing to slosh taxpayer money around.

In other words, someone has a money incentive to change the game, and the power to do it, and we're all worse off as a result.

This is great. I love to see this kind of news. Good teachers are very expensive and there's a of schools that prefers to have mediocre ones and capitalize their earnings.

I'm doing 4 to 6 online courses per year I think it's a great way to spend my money. And I always have the same teachers with me

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