Kindergarten Teacher Earns $700,000 by Selling Lesson Plans Online
mashable.com
mashable.com
What happens is that Teachers in schools start tutorial classes. Either singly or in groups they set up tutorial homes and they recruit students from their day jobs. Often there is a hidden implication that if you don't join the tutorial (for which, of course you pay extra money) you will fare poorly in class.
At best, the teachers put less effort into their regular job and students suffer.
I would hate for this system to be adopted widely. Putting stuff online is a little different, but I am very ambivalent about this kind of privatization of education...
My partner is studying to become a primary school teacher and one thing that has surprised me is the level of duplication in the system. At an individual school a couple of teachers teaching the same year level are coming up with a lesson plan. There are hundreds of other schools essentially teaching to the same framework. Now I'm not advocating a completely standardised curriculum with no room for the teacher to put their own individual style in the lessons. What I am saying though is that I think everyone would benefit if there was much more sharing of knowledge throughout the system. Something like this site enables that knowledge sharing.
[1] https://www.lessplan.com/ (use invite code: beta-212 if anyone wants to play around)
Tools that share knowledge are inherently good. Creating an efficient marketplace for knowledge transfer is good. Allowing a mixed for-free, for-pay market is amazingly good.
Way to fucking rob my childhood of play-time, assholes.
Then I get dropped into an American high-school and don't catch up with my middle-school math & science until 3 years later. In the mean time, I couldn't play any sport or a music instrument; couldn't do any independent "project", be it art or science, as I was never tasked with creative work hitherto. I could parrot trignometric identities and chemical properties of hundreds of substance. I knew laws of physics cold, could derive them on paper, but couldn't observe & measure an experiment or design one or use an instrument to save my life.
Thank FSM I didn't let my schooling get in the way of my education.
Other than instead of a big educational publisher, the money goes to the author?
I guess it's like the difference between buying 'protection' from the mob and hiring a legitimate security guard.
Current scenario: Teacher makes lesson plan. Teacher teaches lesson plan.
With this system: Teacher makes lesson plan. Teacher teaches lesson plan. Teacher sells lesson plan.
If anything they have incentive to do better work as it would be more likely to get purchased.
From my reading of the article, the target market is other teachers. My mother (a teacher) could sell lesson plans she's used for 20+ years, and another teacher (perhaps one straight out of college, with limited practice creating her own plans) could purchase it and either make modifications for her own class or teach it directly.
Let me try out a corollary: Some engineers sometimes wrongly steal code from their employers when they leave for a new job, ergo no software engineers should ever be allowed to work for more than one company.
Yep, this argument is air tight.
In private schools, on the other hand, the practice is common. My 9th grade math teacher taught an after school SAT prep class, for example.
It describes a teacher that is selling lesson plans to other teachers, so they can use proven plans. The creating teachers can invest more time into the creation as they will earn some additional money by selling it.
You describe teachers selling their teaching to students beside the normal teaching activities. Totally different thing, isn't it?
Until schools are palaces, and teachers earn high six figures, I have no problem with 1) teachers earning extra income, by 2) sharing knowledge with other teachers.
If you want to make the world a better place, then argue that all teachers should have a budget to buy lesson plans from places like this.
...so that they can focus their time and energy on the students who need help, rather than on creating lesson plans, over and over again, all across the country, for the same topics.
Remember that even with what they pay now, teaching positions are in high demand. Quadruple what teachers earn, and you'll have even more demand. How are you to be sure you're getting what you're paying for? In medicine and law, that's achieved through a series of very expensive gate keepers.
In any event, I think it would be great if a young hotshot from Harvard could be paid $90,000 to start at some godawful but trying to improve school, with a 50% bonus potential if his students show improvement. But the unions would never allow such a program.
If I'm well paid and satisfied with my current job then I'll make sure to get a good night sleep and be ready the next day to do a good job. If I'm unhappy or think I could be making more then I'll either do work on the side or spend more time working on my resume and interviewing for a better job. If I think my career doesn't have much potential then I'll really spend a lot of time outside of work trying to switch careers.
If you want teachers to do a good job, hire talented people and pay them accordingly. If you want a McDonald's like education system where a handful of chefs come up with bland but easily executable recipes then we can go down that path too. Just don't be surprised when your kids are switching careers from fry-vat guy to third grade teacher. And don't be surprised when the talented teachers see it as a stepping stone and get the heck out of there.
It goes without saying seasoned teachers will have a cache of lesson plans that they can, and do, pass along or sell. Why should one not be allowed to profit on the labor they already expended for an incredible service to other teachers?
This has already been "adopted widely", for decades, and the teacher-lesson-plan-community is an incredibly active and vibrant one. The countless lesson plan networks, online/offline, free/paid, are an invaluable service to teachers.
I find the negativity odd, that we as hackers, who create, build on, share, and sell our toolsets, would have a problem with this.
For the most part, you're getting additional income for little extra work, and what work you do to improve your side job comes back to improve your day job as well.
If you're spending hours struggling with a system that is difficult to set up / get it to pay out / otherwise distract from teaching, then sure. But I haven't used the system so I couldn't say whether or not issues like this are occurring (and it certainly sounds like it's working for the teacher in question).
As a former teacher, here is an example lesson plan:
AGE GROUP: Year 5 TOPIC: Introducing prime numbers
STARTER: Mixed multiplication table questions on board. MAIN ACTIVITY: Write the number 92 on the board. Ask students whether '92' appears in any multiplication table. When the answer '2' is received, stress that multiplication tables do not end at 10 or 12, but continue on indefinitely. Repeat for the numbers '999', '186', and '495'. Next, write the number 71 on the board. Students will conclude that it does not appear in any 'tables'. Explain that it does, offering a reward for the first correct answer. With or without hinting, get the answer '1' or '71'. Offering a second reward, get the second of the pair. Explain that every whole number is in the 'one' times table and the 'itself' times table. However, such numbers are called 'prime' if those are the only ones. Ask students to name other prime numbers below 50, discussing suggestions.
Complete is_it_prime.doc. Students who finish quickly should attempt is_it_prime_2.doc.
That's not meant to be particularly inspiring or anything, just representative. As a teacher, you have a legal obligation to have such a plan for every lesson you teach (this was true in the UK, can't speak for other countries).
I get the impression that in the US they don't have a national curriculum or external exams &c so the teacher has to do more long term planning on their own.
If customization is so important, what's wrong with applying it to a purchased lesson plan?
I thought this would be great for some post-retirement income. She has years of experience, so possibly, the planning part would come easy to her AND the side benefit of not actually having to TEACH the little stink-pots...
Teachers: $$
Businesses: $$$$$$$$$$$
I just got an email this morning from someone responding to an AdWords ad for Appointment Reminder. The ad costs $8 a click, for reasons which will soon be obvious. The contents of the email: "Quote me a price for X appointmnts a month." I did. "OK, we want it." If they stay around for the year I just earned several hundred copies of BCC with two emails and a few minutes of data entry.
http://mrsjumpsclass.blogspot.com/
and what puts kindergarten teachers, who are graduates of college major programs in education in the usual case, in need of lesson plans for their young pupils. Is there room for a lot of other market entrants in this market?
Why not buy one, check it out? They are cheap, many are free. Its easy to criticise, but almost as easy to have an informed opinion.
I can imagine many new teachers are glad to have an experienced educator guide them. It can be challenging to have a fresh plan 180 days in a row. At the least, these plans provide another viewpoint.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2011/09/teache...
My initial surprise at the announcement that lesson plans sell that well stems from
1) writing my own lesson plans, adapted to a particular group of students I teach, and thus
2) thinking, don't most teachers plan their lessons for their particular class, with its individual mix of students?
while also knowing
3) many materials provided by textbook publishers have somewhat of built-in lesson plans.
So I'm still surprised to see that the market is as large as it evidently is for canned lesson plans, but it is, and it appears that other teachers ought to enter it.
I imagine a lot of teachers are buying the plans to avoid 80% of the work, and then adjusting them to fit their specific pupils.
And some of them are probably lazily teaching them straight off the shelf as well. So it goes.
http://www.skillsworkshop.org/
http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resources/
and many teachers have their own Web sites.
I quite like the non-monetised sharing model, but I imagine HNers would be more interested in a commercial opportunity
Lesson plans are a big issue for pre-K also. You tend to have to do the plans in a much more individualized way with not all of the kids at once. It was quite a challenge just finding time to write up the plans based on the tests. Automation was a huge gain.
interesting that these teacher startups are founded by males from a female dominated starting industry.
In reality teachers usually work long hours in dedication to their profession and their students, and do so for far less money than most professionals with that workload.
If the lessons plans are good enough for a huge numbers of teachers to drop $700k on them, you can damn well bet they were developed with a huge investment of personal time. Either that, or the teacher is a fricking genius.
Either way, I don't think there's anyway to construe this as "the taxpayers are getting shafted on this employment contract."
- 4:45am, awake
- 5:30am, out the door
- 6:00am, gets to school
- 6-8 she does whatever needs done for classes, meets with students, meets with peers or administration
- 8:00am, classes begin
- 9:30am, break time for 1hr 30 minutes -- but students will come in during this time to either make up tests, get extra help with something, or just do work. She can also have meetings (again) with peers, administration or sometimes parents.
- 11:00am, lunch for 1hr -- but again, students will usually come in to do whatever they need to do.
- 12:00pm, next class
- 1:30pm, next class
- 3:00pm, school's out
- 3-5, meetings with peers, getting ready for class tomorrow, emailing parents, handling disciplinary issues, prints lesson plans or whatever else needs done at school
- 5:30pm, home
- 6:00pm, eat and take a nap for however long she can get
- 8:00pm, wake up from nap, grade papers, enter in grades (if grades aren't posted online within 2 days she'll get about 5 emails a day from parents asking about it)
- 10:00pm, gets ready for bed
- 11:30pm, can finally get to sleep due to thinking/preparing for the next day.
She gets paid $36,000 a year. I have so much respect for her. Oh, I forgot to tell you -- all her lesson plans change each semester. They don't have books in half their classes -- they use a county wide "lesson plan" which must be printed out for each student. The school system believes in "evolving" education, so every semester they try to incorporate different topics or try to approach different methodologies. While I commend them for that, it negatively effects the teachers in excess busy work. If they used a printed book for 10 years in a row, she'd do it once and be done, with variations being in classes taught.
Suggest using those meetings with colleagues to explore team planning. Leverage a good lesson by using it with more classes at same level/subject.
Assessment ('grading' in American): any scope for MCQ or self/peer assessment?
Better numbers can be found at http://www.bls.gov/data/
Total compensation per hour for elementary/secondary school teachers: 56.59 (and avg wage is 38.39); far higher than any other public position (save administrators - they get cake too).
Starting teacher salary in my district is $42,000 per year for a 187-day contract. Assuming the teachers only work 7 hours a day (which is insultingly low; my first year teaching I worked 60-70 hours a week): 42000 / 7 * 187 = $32.09 per hour.
I think if you (wrongly, IMO) assume that all teachers in America work only the hours that they're on the clock in front of children, then MAYBE that number is believable. But that's not the reality of the teaching profession, in my experience.
Edit: I see that number is "total compensation", which presumably includes health care and such. I don't know how to meaningfully add that to my estimate, but it would certainly increase it.
They also don't get any benefits from FICA and medicare. That pension they pay into is supposed to cover all of that but costs more than FICA and Medicare.
And much like a teacher "gets off work at 3pm" they do in fact work year round. They may not be in the classroom, but in the summer they are usually going to workshops and conferences and doing long term lesson planning for the coming year.
Fact remains that most lesson planning involves repurposing old material. It is never from a clean slate and now with testing pushed so much there is little time for a flexible curriculum. How many times are you going to rewrite the fractions lesson?
Next response will state that teachers actually work more than 365 days a year as they have mastered time travel. I respect teachers, but blind statements that they work so much actually does more harm than good. Work smart, not hard. Which is why people are buying lesson plans than writing their own. And going on vacation instead of that boring workshop.
If I 'teach' the lesson, not very often.
If I want each and every student to understand the concept of proportion, and each student be able to use fractions and ratios effectively, I'll need to adjust the presentation, sequence, style and approach a lot of times, quite possibly on the fly in the classroom.
Now, how many programming languages and code libraries do we really need?
No.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
I wish I understood why this myth was so pervasive.
In other words, although other professions are as likely to work from home or other places, it fails to mention the amount of hours that teachers DO work outside the office - at least the good ones that actually care. In the same breath there are many teachers who just skate by because they know they won't get fired.
The essay also doesn't take into account the length of a teachers workday nor the nature of the work. When my wife taught she had to arrive at 6:30am and often didn't get home until 4:30 or 5:00pm on a good day. Have you ever tryed to entertain twenty 7-year-olds for 10 hours? It's pretty exhausting - not to mention the fact that they also have to deal with the administration requirements, parents, standardized testing, other bad teachers that never will lose their jobs, etc. All for 34k per year before taxes.
Say it's 11:23am and you need to use the restroom. Sorry, you can't exactly just walk out of class to run down the hall. You have to wait until your 20 minute lunch break which includes walking the kids to and from the lunchroom.
Just to give some perspective, this is such a problem where we live that that I know or know of nearly a dozen teachers no longer in the classroom or looking for other employment.
For those teachers who feel they are living the life, I'd love to know where they live because from where I sit summers odd is about the best thing going for teachers.
It helps to read a report all the way to paragraph 2 before determining it is garbage.
"Because of the way in which the data are collected, it is possible to identify and quantify the work that teachers do at home, at a workplace, and at other locations and to examine the data by day of the week and time of day"
It's possible you work more than average, in which case there are others who who work less than average. Or perhaps you just overestimate the work you put in (same as most people do).
I've worked in public education for fifteen years, and I know almost no teachers who work as little as the "average" quoted in the BLS results.
But then I work for a "good" school (top 100 in my State, nearly top 1000 in the US). I suspect the difference between the data (which I'm sure is accurate) and my experience boils down to "Good teachers work a lot of hours. Many (most?) of the teachers in America are not good."
When I write code as part of my employment, I don't own the copyright for that code. Do teachers actually own the copyright to their lesson plans if the lesson plan is an expected product of their job?
2) Even if taxpayers do pay teacher salaries, they do so using local tax revenue for educating students in their respective state and municipality. Once this lesson content is consumed by students and teaching is complete, what is the benefit of the taxpayer usurping this content, and for what purpose?
If you do, ask them how many hours per day they have set aside to create lesson plans, and grade papers.
Then ask them how much money out of their own pocket they have spent buying supplies for their classroom.
If the teachers you know are paid to create lesson plans, are paid to grade papers, and do get a sufficient budget for school supplies, then please tell me where you live, so that I can tell the teachers that I know to move there.
This is marketplace for teachers to sell and buy lesson plans. Things like worksheets for in-class work, homework to assign, ideas for projects to assign, or material to supplement in-class instruction for the students. This is actually a really smart and obvious idea, and well executed it seems.