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Comment by kghose | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this. I lived in India for almost a decade - Calcutta to be precise, but I think what I have to say applies to most of India.

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...

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Same in mideast as well. Eight hours of formal schooling, then 4 hours of "tutoring" after school by the same teachers, and with same students.

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.

How is this relevant to the article?

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?

I think the point is that when teachers start having well paying secondary jobs, the actual teaching may suffer. If you have an hour after school, do you spend it helping your students, or tweaking your latest for-profit lesson plans?

How is this any different than any other job, and why are we limiting a teacher's earning potential? If they're not well paid then they'll find ways to supplement their income.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND_a8rA67VA

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.

I like The West Wing, too, but what evidence is there that requiring teachers to meet the same professional standards as, say, doctors would actually be worth the cost to society and their time and effort?

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.

In the U.S. teachers are responsible for compiling 5-8 lesson plans a day. Multiply that number by the number of school days. Each lesson plan then needs to meet specific requirements that varies between state.

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.

If you're tweaking your lesson plans to make concepts more clear, that benefits all your students as well.

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).

I don't think this is really a worry in Australia at least. Often teachers are left coming up with lesson plans on the fly and the students suffer.

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.

Yeh, my partner is also becoming a primary school teacher in Australia. I also noticed the duplication with lesson plans they were having when they went to do their practical components at schools. So I built a little app[1] to help her and her colleagues create lesson plans and share it with each other. No intention of monetising it, just wanted to learn some mongodb and rails with it.

[1] https://www.lessplan.com/ (use invite code: beta-212 if anyone wants to play around)

It's not the students that are paying to be taught, it's the teachers/schools that are paying to reduce (or perhaps refocus) the teacher's workload. Instead of coming up with lesson plan from scratch, the teacher can start with something usually better than they would have come up with on their own, and spend their time tailoring it to the strengths and weaknesses of their class, or even specific students. Or maybe they can spend more time giving feedback on students' assignments.

I'm just dumbfounded that we in the software community, with all of our tools for sharing knowledge, and buying apps, would have any problem with this.

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.

Being from Cal and being a product of this system, I remember being so frustrated in my childhood. My school was bit far off from my house, so I could not join those "coaching" classes of teachers living near the school.The result was that teachers used to teach poorly in the school with a hidden message "join my tutorials to get a good grade". Many of my peers (not all) who joined the tutorials used to perform better than me owing to more exposure to exclusive study materials/coaching. If you become a teacher in any city in India,you will become rich. The coaching industry drives the economy at Kota ( city in Western India) .

Wait. Let me see if I can summarize: Some teachers somewhere are corrupt and poor at their job, ergo all teachers worldwide should be forbidden from monetizing their hard work???

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.

Check your contract. For example, I can be a software developer and a barman, but I can't be a software developer for 2 companies in related fields.

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque

How is this different from buying a book or textbook on the subject?

Other than instead of a big educational publisher, the money goes to the author?

The problem is that the teacher has an incentive to reduce the quality of her education during the normal class.

I guess it's like the difference between buying 'protection' from the mob and hiring a legitimate security guard.

Why would the teacher have an incentive to reduce the quality or her education during the normal class?

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.

So you're saying that the target market is students - a teacher does a half-assed teaching job in class and pushes students to pay for improved lesson plan online. I'm fairly certain such a teacher would be fired post haste.

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.

This practice is illegal in the US. A teacher can't take money for tutoring from their current students.

jedberg, you're not working at reddit anymore.. you have to use citations now in internet discussions. ;)

I don't think this is illegal, but many (most?) public school districts forbid their teachers from doing this.

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.

What law is this?

Unfortunately, even if illegal, there is a way around it. So what some of the teachers where I studied did (one of the eastern European countries) was to send her/his students to visit tutorial classes of the other teacher (for which you pay) and vice versa.

happened to me as well. teacher deliberately underperforms in school, hoping for us to take the bait and come to his private tuition classes. at one point he had over 200 students each paying fifty bucks per month for lessons.

I didn't realize that parents felt like they had to purchase this extra content in order to keep their children 'caught up' or successful in the class. If that's the case, then that's very unhealthy (and unfair).

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