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conuly
Who owns lesson plans? Is it the teacher who wrote them?
Well, most of us would say that if you spend hours of unpaid labor doing work to make you better at your underpaid job, you get to own what you make then. And apparently some teachers would say so too, which is why you can buy teacher-made lesson plans online. (Of course, you could always buy lesson plans somewhere, but some teachers are cutting out the middle man and selling their own plans.)
And then - shock and horror! - they're spending the money they earn. Oh, sure, mostly that money appears to be going towards classroom supplies, which I would think the state should pay for, but sometimes - terrible! - they're paying for things like mortgages and home repair and the occasional dinner out. Yes, they're living the high life and it's WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Lemme tell you something. If teachers have to resort to selling the fruits of their hard (and otherwise unpaid!) labor online in order to pay off their mortgages (or, worse, purchase the supplies that should have been provided for them and their students already), there's room for outrage, sure, but not at the teachers. (For that matter, even if they're spending that money on fast cars and trips overseas in first class, who gives a fuck? This is a capitalist nation, isn't it? Can't they spend the money they earned from their time however they like? If we're gonna get all "socialist" about our public school teachers, well, I may just move! To Canada!)
Of course, the comments are a pain. Some people are under the impression that buying and selling lesson plans is EXACTLY THE SAME as buying and selling tests. Stupid. We don't expect surgeons to re-invent the art every time they pick up a scalpel, do we? No, we tell them how the procedure goes when they're in school (and still being tested on these things) and then we let them do it. Why should teachers spend hours of their own (unpaid!) time writing up a lesson plan on something they have to cover when 50 other people have already done it? They've already passed their tests, we assume they know how to teach (if they don't, well, then they need all the help they can get, don't they?), so let's help them do it already!
Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions
By WINNIE HU
Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
“To the extent that school district resources are used, then I think it’s fair to ask whether the district should share in the proceeds,” said Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents.
The marketplace for educational tips and tricks is too new to have generated policies or guidelines in most places. In Fairfax County, Va., officials had been studying the issue when they discovered this fall that a former football coach was selling his playbook and instructional DVDs online for $197; they investigated but let him keep selling.
A high school English teacher in upstate New York said her bosses barred her from selling plans used in her classroom; she spoke on the condition that she not be named.
Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.
“Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,” he said. “But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”
Teachers like Erica Bohrer, though, see the new demand for lessons as long-awaited recognition of their worth.
“Teaching can be a thankless job,” said Ms. Bohrer, 30, who has used the $650 she earned in the past year to add books to a reading nook in her first-grade classroom at Daniel Street Elementary School on Long Island and to help with mortgage payments. “I put my hard-earned time and effort into creating these things, and I just would like credit.”
The humble lesson plan has gained value as focus on testing and individualized instruction has increased. At the same time, the Internet has diminished the isolation of classroom teachers. Just about every imaginable lesson for preschool through college is now up for sale — on individual teachers’ blogs as well as commercial sites where buyers can review and grade the material.
Teachers Pay Teachers, one of the largest such sites, with more than 200,000 registered users, has recorded $600,000 in sales since it was started in 2006 — $450,000 of that in the past year, said its founder, Paul Edelman, a former New York City teacher. The top seller, a high school English teacher in California, has made $36,000 in sales.
Another site, We Are Teachers, went online last year with a “knowledge marketplace” that includes lesson plans and online tutoring.
Kelly Gionti, a teacher at the High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice in Manhattan, has sold $2,544 worth of unit plans for “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Great Gatsby,” among others, helping finance trips to Rome and Ireland, as well as class supplies.
Margaret Whisnant, a retired teacher in North Carolina, earns an average of $750 a month from lessons based on her three decades of teaching middle school classics like “The Outsiders,” enough to pay for new kitchen counters and appliances.
“I have wanted to redo my kitchen for 20 years, and I just could not get the funds together,” she said. “Well, now I’m going to have to learn to cook.”
Lisa Michalek, 40, who taught for six years in Rochester and now works for Aventa Learning, a for-profit online education company, said she spent about five hours a week tweaking old lesson plans and creating new ones, like an earth science curriculum that sells for $59.95.
“I knew I had good lessons, so I thought, ‘Why not see what other people think of it?’ ” Ms. Michalek said.
After $31,000 in sales, she has her answer. Alice Coburn, 56, a vocational education teacher in Goshen, N.Y., said she saved two to three hours each time she downloaded Ms. Michalek’s PowerPoint presentations instead of starting from scratch. “I hate reinventing the wheel,” Ms. Coburn said.
Others find comfort in having a class-tested lesson by a more experienced teacher. Lauren Perreca, 24, used a $10 lesson on the Vietnam War novel “Fallen Angels” as a reference last year while creating her own lesson for her classes at Weston High School in Connecticut. She also revised her reading questions about “Lord of the Flies” after comparing them with two other lesson plans.
“At first I was self-conscious I had bought something, because what did that say about me?” she said. “But I realized I wasn’t just taking it and using it, I was adapting it to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.”
Now Ms. Perreca has started selling her own lesson plans, like a 54-page “Macbeth” unit with quizzes and homework assignments ($10) that she wrote in graduate school. She said she spent $140 of her $523 in earnings on cookies and books for her students, and used the rest to splurge on dinners out that she could not otherwise afford.
Her students are incredulous. “They’re like, ‘Who would want to buy those? They’re so boring,’ ” Ms. Perreca said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m making money.’ ”
In Ms. Bohrer’s class the other day in Lindenhurst, N.Y., five children were counting M&Ms while she made sure they digested the lesson before the candy. The exercise, which comes with directions, sorting mats and work sheets, has sold 31 times for $3 a pop. A variation with Lucky Charms is popular around St. Patrick’s Day, she said.
“M&M sorting is not a new concept,” said Ms. Bohrer, who has been teaching since 2001. “I made it easier for teachers to do. They just have to click and print.”
Daniel Street’s principal, Frank Picozzi, said he supported Ms. Bohrer’s online business because his students reaped the benefits of her initiative and creativity.
Ms. Bohrer recalled that when she used to share her lesson plans at no charge, a poster of her reading strategies was passed around so many times that it ended up with a teacher in another school who had no idea where it came from.
“I’ll share with friends,” Ms. Bohrer said, “and if anyone else likes it, I’ll tell them where to buy it.”
Well, most of us would say that if you spend hours of unpaid labor doing work to make you better at your underpaid job, you get to own what you make then. And apparently some teachers would say so too, which is why you can buy teacher-made lesson plans online. (Of course, you could always buy lesson plans somewhere, but some teachers are cutting out the middle man and selling their own plans.)
And then - shock and horror! - they're spending the money they earn. Oh, sure, mostly that money appears to be going towards classroom supplies, which I would think the state should pay for, but sometimes - terrible! - they're paying for things like mortgages and home repair and the occasional dinner out. Yes, they're living the high life and it's WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Lemme tell you something. If teachers have to resort to selling the fruits of their hard (and otherwise unpaid!) labor online in order to pay off their mortgages (or, worse, purchase the supplies that should have been provided for them and their students already), there's room for outrage, sure, but not at the teachers. (For that matter, even if they're spending that money on fast cars and trips overseas in first class, who gives a fuck? This is a capitalist nation, isn't it? Can't they spend the money they earned from their time however they like? If we're gonna get all "socialist" about our public school teachers, well, I may just move! To Canada!)
Of course, the comments are a pain. Some people are under the impression that buying and selling lesson plans is EXACTLY THE SAME as buying and selling tests. Stupid. We don't expect surgeons to re-invent the art every time they pick up a scalpel, do we? No, we tell them how the procedure goes when they're in school (and still being tested on these things) and then we let them do it. Why should teachers spend hours of their own (unpaid!) time writing up a lesson plan on something they have to cover when 50 other people have already done it? They've already passed their tests, we assume they know how to teach (if they don't, well, then they need all the help they can get, don't they?), so let's help them do it already!
Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions
By WINNIE HU
Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
“To the extent that school district resources are used, then I think it’s fair to ask whether the district should share in the proceeds,” said Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents.
The marketplace for educational tips and tricks is too new to have generated policies or guidelines in most places. In Fairfax County, Va., officials had been studying the issue when they discovered this fall that a former football coach was selling his playbook and instructional DVDs online for $197; they investigated but let him keep selling.
A high school English teacher in upstate New York said her bosses barred her from selling plans used in her classroom; she spoke on the condition that she not be named.
Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.
“Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,” he said. “But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”
Teachers like Erica Bohrer, though, see the new demand for lessons as long-awaited recognition of their worth.
“Teaching can be a thankless job,” said Ms. Bohrer, 30, who has used the $650 she earned in the past year to add books to a reading nook in her first-grade classroom at Daniel Street Elementary School on Long Island and to help with mortgage payments. “I put my hard-earned time and effort into creating these things, and I just would like credit.”
The humble lesson plan has gained value as focus on testing and individualized instruction has increased. At the same time, the Internet has diminished the isolation of classroom teachers. Just about every imaginable lesson for preschool through college is now up for sale — on individual teachers’ blogs as well as commercial sites where buyers can review and grade the material.
Teachers Pay Teachers, one of the largest such sites, with more than 200,000 registered users, has recorded $600,000 in sales since it was started in 2006 — $450,000 of that in the past year, said its founder, Paul Edelman, a former New York City teacher. The top seller, a high school English teacher in California, has made $36,000 in sales.
Another site, We Are Teachers, went online last year with a “knowledge marketplace” that includes lesson plans and online tutoring.
Kelly Gionti, a teacher at the High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice in Manhattan, has sold $2,544 worth of unit plans for “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Great Gatsby,” among others, helping finance trips to Rome and Ireland, as well as class supplies.
Margaret Whisnant, a retired teacher in North Carolina, earns an average of $750 a month from lessons based on her three decades of teaching middle school classics like “The Outsiders,” enough to pay for new kitchen counters and appliances.
“I have wanted to redo my kitchen for 20 years, and I just could not get the funds together,” she said. “Well, now I’m going to have to learn to cook.”
Lisa Michalek, 40, who taught for six years in Rochester and now works for Aventa Learning, a for-profit online education company, said she spent about five hours a week tweaking old lesson plans and creating new ones, like an earth science curriculum that sells for $59.95.
“I knew I had good lessons, so I thought, ‘Why not see what other people think of it?’ ” Ms. Michalek said.
After $31,000 in sales, she has her answer. Alice Coburn, 56, a vocational education teacher in Goshen, N.Y., said she saved two to three hours each time she downloaded Ms. Michalek’s PowerPoint presentations instead of starting from scratch. “I hate reinventing the wheel,” Ms. Coburn said.
Others find comfort in having a class-tested lesson by a more experienced teacher. Lauren Perreca, 24, used a $10 lesson on the Vietnam War novel “Fallen Angels” as a reference last year while creating her own lesson for her classes at Weston High School in Connecticut. She also revised her reading questions about “Lord of the Flies” after comparing them with two other lesson plans.
“At first I was self-conscious I had bought something, because what did that say about me?” she said. “But I realized I wasn’t just taking it and using it, I was adapting it to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.”
Now Ms. Perreca has started selling her own lesson plans, like a 54-page “Macbeth” unit with quizzes and homework assignments ($10) that she wrote in graduate school. She said she spent $140 of her $523 in earnings on cookies and books for her students, and used the rest to splurge on dinners out that she could not otherwise afford.
Her students are incredulous. “They’re like, ‘Who would want to buy those? They’re so boring,’ ” Ms. Perreca said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m making money.’ ”
In Ms. Bohrer’s class the other day in Lindenhurst, N.Y., five children were counting M&Ms while she made sure they digested the lesson before the candy. The exercise, which comes with directions, sorting mats and work sheets, has sold 31 times for $3 a pop. A variation with Lucky Charms is popular around St. Patrick’s Day, she said.
“M&M sorting is not a new concept,” said Ms. Bohrer, who has been teaching since 2001. “I made it easier for teachers to do. They just have to click and print.”
Daniel Street’s principal, Frank Picozzi, said he supported Ms. Bohrer’s online business because his students reaped the benefits of her initiative and creativity.
Ms. Bohrer recalled that when she used to share her lesson plans at no charge, a poster of her reading strategies was passed around so many times that it ended up with a teacher in another school who had no idea where it came from.
“I’ll share with friends,” Ms. Bohrer said, “and if anyone else likes it, I’ll tell them where to buy it.”
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 09:48 pm (UTC)I'm glad people are making money from their creativity! Good lesson plans can be time-consuming to create and teachers are already severely underpaid.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 11:21 pm (UTC)But then, I've heard this idea discussed a lot about coding, where the idea of resolving a well-solved problem is not that favorably looked upon.
I'm not saying teachers should use someone else's plans. I strongly support looking at individual situations. A teacher knows his or her class and area and what may or may not work there. But if they feel something would, I just don't see the value in a person resolving a solved problem, especially from scratch.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 12:07 am (UTC)Apparently the problem isn't the buying of lesson plans, it's the selling of them. Because once you've spent a lot of time and effort coming up with a lesson plan, you're supposed to either keep it secret or give it free to any loser who asks, no questions asked.
Screw that. When we get our communist utopia, maybe teachers will be paid enough they won't have to resort to selling lesson plans to pay the bills. But I don't see that communist utopia on my block just yet.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 01:43 am (UTC)At Ana's school it's one teacher for everything except science, gym, and Spanish, and literacy. I think they want to get a full-time music teacher again as well. After elementary school you go on to the next stage which might be intermediate school, junior high, or middle school... but as near as I can tell, those terms all mean the same thing. Some of the junior highs still go up to the 9th grade. And then high school, which runs 9 - 12, with a slight increase of students in the 10th grade.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-04 06:18 pm (UTC)Middle schools differ (officially, in actual practice this may not come into effect at all) from junior highs in that the middle school model has more grouping of students (so a homeroom does most classes together) and the teachers collaborate more. Apparently. Junior high is like high school for younger kids.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 05:41 am (UTC)I suppose I can see the perspective of the guy who said that selling lesson plans cheapens what teachers do, to a certain extent. If we take the hours spent creating lesson plans from scratch as part of the value of a teacher as a commodity, then reducing those hours should mean that the value of a teacher falls. Similarly, once lesson plan prep becomes a commercial good that can be bought by anyone, the mystique of the teacher is tarnished, and teachers become more replaceable.
Of course, there's no guarantee that teachers who spend more time are being payed more, and no guarantee that teachers who spend less time or use free lesson plans from other teachers are being payed less, which would reflect the value added by preparing lesson plans from scratch (nevermind whether the plans made from scratch are necessarily better). And of course there's no indication that teachers who purchase lesson plans are doing less work to modify them for their classes' needs.
And on top of all of that, let's be honest: good teachers will be good teachers if they buy lesson plans or not. The good ones will make the pre-made plans better, while the bad ones will do the same job they did when they slapped together a half-assed lesson plan on their own.The bad teachers might even be improved by a good lesson plan.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-05 07:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-13 06:55 am (UTC)(I'm playing catch up on your journal)
no subject
Date: 2009-12-13 07:16 am (UTC)Yeah, I can see :P
They're spending their own money to buy lesson plans... which other teachers have made on their own time when they're off the clock.
Because teachers shouldn't have to spend their hard earned money to buy lesson plans.
I donated two dollars to a school in NC, I got the letters in the mail just yesterday. You know what the letters said? "Thank you, because we like our new pencils and our new pencil sharpener." WTF? Teachers shouldn't have to pay for this, and they shouldn't have to scrounge and beg to pay for these basic basics either! These aren't even the sort of basics like books that you can see money might be tight, we're talking PENCILS and a PENCIL SHARPENER.