Kindergarten Teacher Earns $700,000 by Selling Lesson Plans Online

http://mashable.com/2012/05/17/teachers-pay-teachers/

by MarlonPro • 14 years ago

136 82 14 years ago

MarlonPro• 14 years ago

Startup Ideas: Find what people need and build an app/product that will fill those needs = $$$$

patio11• 14 years ago

As the resident "Been there, done that" guy with regards to teachers I think I'm 99.9% of the way to "You should probably build something for businesses instead -- for equivalent levels of savvy/work you'll get a lot more money while suffering a lot less."

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.

MarkMc2• 14 years ago

Hey Patrick it's great to hear that Appointment Reminder is doing well - congratulations!

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

I saw this link just after MarlonPro did, in the feed of a Facebook friend who is an author on homeschooling. One comment by one of her friends was, "Perpetuating lesson plans that may or may not actually be interesting to a child and may actually turn a child off a topic? The teacher can keep her big bucks. . . . although, wonder if you could do plans that promote independent learning?" It is interesting to think about what could be involved in lesson plans for kindergarten,

http://www.mrsjumpsclass.com/

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?

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

Pretty negative - so the lesson plans are crap, they don't promote independent learming, the children are not interested. You read all that from the article?

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.

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

Thanks for your comment. I found more context about the teacher profiled in the Mashable article in this older article from an Education Week blog:

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.

Drbble3• 14 years ago

What puts college educated computer programmers in need of design docs and standard libraries? Shouldn't they write their own?

stephengillie• 14 years ago

Could the lesson plans be open-sourced?

Drbble3• 14 years ago

It is free market. There are also open source lesson plans ("computerless cs" one) as well a libraries.

keithpeter4• 14 years ago

In the UK many teachers share activities (lesson planning is different here because of the frameworks we teach in). There are sharing sites like

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

ja272• 14 years ago

Funny because the majority of homeschoolers I know teach canned curriculum. The only real advantage for a homeschooler like that is that they can select the best curriculum for their individual kid(s) rather than having to select it for a whole classroom at a time. But a lot of times they just pick what their friends use so they can feel comfortable with their choice.

kghose• 14 years ago

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...

robryan• 14 years ago

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.

sonnymai• 14 years ago

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)

praxulus• 14 years ago

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.

VikingCoder4• 14 years ago

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.

mahmud• 14 years ago

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.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

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?

MarkMc2• 14 years ago

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.

loganb2• 14 years ago

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.

jmitcheson• 14 years ago

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

yardie• 14 years ago

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.

jedberg2• 14 years ago

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

jrockway• 14 years ago

What law is this?

mh-• 14 years ago

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

nphrk• 14 years ago

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.

edj• 14 years ago

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.

jackhammer2022• 14 years ago

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) .

bazookaBen• 14 years ago

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.

Sujan• 14 years ago

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?

smackfu• 14 years ago

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?

ryancarson• 14 years ago

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).

blinkingled• 14 years ago

So what does this offer that Khan Academy doesn't for free? Looks like they manage to use social media effectively and I haven't checked but may be they have more targeted or traditional education friendly content over there?

eddie_the_head• 14 years ago

Khan Academy does not offer lesson plans, just videos and an exercise/practice framework.

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.

brianobush5• 14 years ago

Of course, tax payers most likely footed the bill for her to come up with those lesson plans.

encoderer• 14 years ago

If you mean she's probably doing it in all the free time teachers usually have while tax payers are lavishing her with a generous salary and benefits, then yes you're right.

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.

eupharis• 14 years ago

Teachers are damn smart people. And very practical when it comes to their tools.

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."

wcchandler• 14 years ago

I was quite surprised by how true this was when my wife started teaching high school math. I initially suspected 10~11 hours a day. Which I equated to my days of going to college full time and working construction full time -- easily 11-12 hour days, 6 days a week. She does so much more. Her typical schedule:

- 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.

brianobush5• 14 years ago

Yes teachers do work hard and long hours. However, many people tend to forget that teachers also don't work year around. At least in the US, there is quite a lengthy summer break. In the compensation arena, (oregon) teachers have pension and pay nothing into FICA/medicare. With the average public school teacher making 45k (7k more than the avg wage in america), I have a hard time believing that they are underpaid. Teacher unions have done a swell job pounding this message.

yummyfajitas2• 14 years ago

...teachers usually work long hours...

No.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

I wish I understood why this myth was so pervasive.

waffle_ss• 14 years ago

I'm also kind of curious about the legal implications of this.

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?

byoung2• 14 years ago

Your employer is specifically paying you to write that code, whereas the teachers are getting paid to teach, not write lesson plans (most write these in their free time). Now if you wrote something that compiled pseudocode into executable code on your own time and you used it to write your code for work, I bet you could sell it on your own with no problem.

muhfuhkuh• 14 years ago

1) Teachers are supposed to come up with those lesson plans for their classroom anyway. So what if they want to distribute it to other teachers? If the school or the state wanted to control the lesson plan content so tightly, they'd design their own plans and foist it on the teachers, which you and I would likely both agree we do not want.

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?

Caballera• 14 years ago

Highly doubtful. My wife who is a NYC teacher comes up with her lessons plans on her own time. There's not enough time in the normal work day to come up with lesson plans so she's usually doing them at night. Teachers do a lot of work outside of 'office hours' to prepare for the next class.

VikingCoder4• 14 years ago

I don't mean to be a jerk, but do you personally know any teachers?

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.

protomyth• 14 years ago

Long ago, I built a lesson plan generator for the LAP and e-LAP skill tests (0-3 year olds). The teachers each put their activities designed to improve a skill and it would print out the needed activities for each child after testing. It was quite the hit. Never did go commercial, bit it did save a lot of time and provided a weird form of networking via activity sharing across centers.

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.

e28eta• 14 years ago

I really don't understand the negativity here. I'm no expert on teaching, but I've definitely heard that some teachers come up with lesson plans in their first couple years teaching a subject, and then just re-use it for the rest of their career (or until the standardized test changes). This seems like a huge waste of effort, because there are so many other teachers covering the same content, with largely similar lesson plans.

If customization is so important, what's wrong with applying it to a purchased lesson plan?

michaelfeathers• 14 years ago

I'm surprised school systems aren't claiming "work for hire" copyright on the lesson plans. I don't think they should, it's just that this is the way that these things typically play out.

fromhet• 14 years ago

The type of thing OP is talking about is actually quite common in Sweden, but as a non-profit (on the teachers behalf, that is). My mother is a teacher and I've worked in a school, and the use of http://www.lektion.se/ is very widespread. All the class plans there are free (as in money).

VikingCoder4• 14 years ago

Many teachers are currently unemployed.

piato• 14 years ago

I may be missing something rather obvious here, but I've read the article three times, and can find no reference to 'coaching' or 'after-school tutorials' at all here. Are they mentioned elsewhere?

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).

keithpeter4• 14 years ago

You would need a little more than that now. Differentiated outcomes &c

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.

andyobryan• 14 years ago

I forwarded this to my mother, who is a retired teacher. She was lauded for her teaching abilities and always had top scores on her evaluations. They even tried to get her to stay upon reaching the required years to retire, but health / back issues forced her to retire.

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...

Drbble3• 14 years ago

Teachers Pay Teachers, DonorsChoose

interesting that these teacher startups are founded by males from a female dominated starting industry.

Kindergarten Teacher Earns $700,000 by Selling Lesson Plans Online

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