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Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

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Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#21

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 pr…

it is hard getting people to work for free

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

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#22

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 actua…

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."

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#23
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.

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#24
post #15
post #9

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…

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.

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#25
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"

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#26
post #8

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 pr…

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…

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.

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#29
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.

Re: Millionaire teachers: a lucrative online marketplace for lesson plans

#30
post #12

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 pr…

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…

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

Yeah, it is.

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