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!
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