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Public School Teachers Selling Lesson Plans Online
theodp writes "Thousands of teachers are using websites like Teachers Pay Teachers and We Are Teachers to cash 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, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, raising questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms."
Robing Peter to pay Paul is pointless and stupid. Obviously lesson plans produced at government funded public schools should be kept free and open so that they can be effectively refined and tailored for specific environments. A shared resource granting a community benefit in creating and maintaining the best possible lesson plans.
The only thing greed ever feeds is more greed.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I fail to see how this raises any questions. The teachers put effort into developing a lesson plan and deserve to do whatever they wish with that lesson plan. I work at a coffee shop and from what I've seen and talked about with the teachers that regularly spend time there, they don't do lesson plans on the clock. It's something they do mostly outside of school.
Plus, teachers don't make a whole lot as it is. If they want to sell their expertise at putting together effective lesson plans, more power to them. In fact, I prefer this system over the traditional "do as the book provides" because it seems to the major text book publishers care more about milking schools for money than actually teaching anything. With a system like this, at least the money helps other teachers.
If teachers don't have enough money for school supplies, then we need higher taxes. Unfortunately, these days with people having children later as well as a significant minority of Americans who are very, VERY against the entire idea of humans having children (without a license from the government of course i.e. eugenics), it's really hard to push tax increases through.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This is just a retarded question. Teachers make piss for money and now someone is complaining that they are actually doing something to compliment that? Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA. They got a 2.6% increase last year but their buying power went DOWN according to the AFT Public Employees
.
We should be applauding these teachers for finding good ways to pass around good teaching material, not bitching that "the taxpayers pay you to teach so we own all of your creative works and you can't ever make money off of them".
For the record, NO I am not a teacher. I just happen to think that we should be doing everything we can to make sure our teachers succeed. Obama talks a big game and I hope he comes through for them but at this point it's been talk.
Piss off theodp and rtb61.
lesson plans are generally not produced at school, typically they are created off the clock at home.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I know the bad ones copy the lesson plans out of the back of the text and are headed out the door as soon as their union obligated hours are done. The good ones spend countless hours of their own time at home, on the weekends, during winter, spring and summer break, creating new and innovative ways to engage their students.
The best of the best pass those ideas down to other teachers, through workshops and other means.
But, I cant fault someone for wanting to get paid for there time.
Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA.
Wrong link. You meant to point to this page, I think. (Your page addresses the salaries of probation officers, agricultural inspectors, and lots of other jobs, but not teachers.) The AFT's numbers show that schoolteachers, on average, make -slightly more- than $50,000/year. While I agree they're badly underpaid, one should also bear in mind that they don't work year-round and get much more vacation than most workers. They do work long hours, but so does everyone else.
Again, I agree their pay is abysmal when compared to their responsibilities and the qualifications we need from them. I can't help but feel our schools'd be in far better shape if we fired, say, 80% or so of the administration and gave their salaries to the teachers.
Given the exorbitant, outrageous, and staggering prices that even first year post-secondary text books sell for, this doesn't seem worth a moment's thought.
Once you've figured out how to price text books about the same as a best seller hard-cover book instead $100-200 a copy, I'll be willing to worry about teachers selling lesson plans.
Three Squirrels
It's not work for hire.
If you're a music teacher hired by a school to teach students to play the instruments but you write a melody on the side on your own time the school doesn't own copyright to the song. It's a resource which you can bring to school (sheet music) and use as an educational tool.
Lesson plans aren't the work being hired. You aren't hired to create a lesson plan, you're hired to teach children.
Similarly if you hire me to create a house and I also manufacture a hammer off the clock you don't own my hammer. If I'm an author and I'm hired to lecture on my research the school doesn't magically inherit rights to my research because I gave a lecture. We once did work for hire and the company asked for all of our computers at the end. We just laughed all the way out the door. If you bring a monitor to work and use it instead of the small crappy corporate monitor--the company doesn't own your monitor just like it doesn't own your tie or your shirt or your shoes. You bring them to work to facilitate working. They aren't work property.
Schools pay teachers to show up and educate students.
That's not true, most courses in the US use canned lesson plans that the district pays a small fortune to obtain. My father is a school administrator (and has been for districts large and small) and I can tell you a significant portion of the budget goes to buying lesson plans*. Look into it and you'll learn that "entrepreneurs" have been making a lot of money off of educating your children.
* On a slightly unrelated note, some districts even have policies that tell teachers they may not deviate from the lesson plans. I even know teachers that have been fired over this issue.
The person you are replying to here is also apparently unaware that teachers often (i.e. usually) do not have sufficient time allocated during school hours to produce lesson plans. Their time is taken up with marking and other activities.
So if they produce lesson plans and resources on their own time, there's no question of anybody being robbed. It's the teacher's own work, and s/he has the right to use or profit from it has s/he sees fit.
Well at my high school there was:
A principle, vice principle/academic councilor, librarian, janitor, I think two accountants and a secretary. Not sure where I would have cut 80% of that.
And I know my mom would LOVE for there be more money spent on administration at her schools since she spends so much time filling out paperwork wasting tons of tax payers' dollars to ensure precious tax payers' dollars aren't being wasted.
Teachers make piss for money and now someone is complaining that they are actually doing something to compliment that? Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA.
In which they only work 180 days a year, get rock solid job security after a few years, have great family health coverage, and are provided a pension plan that absolves them from having to pay the social security "tax" every paycheck like the rest of us who probably won't even get anything out of it.
It's not as bad of a deal as you would think (why do you think so many people do it?) and it's not bad pay actually if you break it down on a per day basis, and your pay is guaranteed to increase over time as well as increase even more if you further your education. You can continue working over summer if you want more money or you can go on a 3 month trip to some foreign country you've always wanted to visit like my mom does every summer because teachers get such a massive amount of time off they can do stuff like that.
I'm not convinced they're paid only for teaching. I'm not payed only for writing code either, though that is the expected end result of my work. My mom used to teach and at least in this corner of the world the teachers are required to do planning work necessary to teach and are considered to be compensated for that time in their salary. Hence the extra material they create / plans should should be considered public property or at least be shared among colleagues. It's tougher for teachers just starting out with new material and gets easier once you've done planning and extra material, so you can reuse it the next course / year. At least here I would very much frown upon someone trying to profit from something they've done while being paid for it and not sharing it.
Do like Japan and teach the kids cleaning responsibilities and that their actions have consequences: They clean the schools.
If teachers were paid on performance, they'd be earning zero per year. But hey, if you think they should be earning $100k/year for 9 months of work while your kid learns nothing, then you pay for it. I certainly won't.
If it were as simple as that. The reality is a classroom id often full of kids who don't really want to learn, expect to get an A just for trying, and have parents who whine and cry whenever their little darling get's less than a 100 despite not actually doing the work. Oh, yea, it's the teacher's fault that students don't learn. Discipline them for acting up? How dare you; obviously it's your fault he or she did what they did. Frankly, some of the things I've heard teachers say they've been called would earn you a fist in your face in most other environments. Sure, there are bad teachers, but there are many more who really care and try and finally get fed up and quit because the crap they put up with isn't worth it. Maybe if parents actually took an active interest in their kid's education things could get better; but I've come to the conclusion most parent's simply don't care. Unfortunately, it is simply less hassle to pass them and let life eventually hit them with a clue by four than actually hold them accountable to some semblance of performance.
Of course, it's getting worse - I've spoken with college professors who say they get calls from parents complaining about kid's grades and expecting them to do something about it.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Nope, parents would never go for their children doing something so degrading. Their child is the next astronaut/President/CEO... Which is probably the biggest problem with the American education system. There is no enforcement at home, and parents aren't willing to believe that they need to put an effort into raising their children. They don't support schools or schooling, they don't encourage their children to complete the coursework, and any attempts to grade a child at his level is often met with the teacher being hauled in front of an administrator to have a meeting with an angry parent about why she's not being fair to poor Johnny the astronaut.
Maybe if parents actually took an active interest in their kid's education things could get better; but I've come to the conclusion most parent's simply don't care.
My Grandmother, Wife, and several close friends are teachers. That is the single gripe that is consistent across all teachers I know. My grandmother and wife had issues with the administration, and my best friend had issues with other teachers, but every teacher I know gripes about the attitude of parents. They want their kid to get A's, but not to be challenged, disciplined, or even disappointed.
It's nothing new, but it is getting worse as far as I can tell. I remember kids goofing off in class and then bragging about how their mother/father came in and read the teacher the riot act to get them out of trouble. I on the other hand, was far more afraid of my parents than anything the school could legally do to me. I fully intend to put the fear of God into my children if I ever find out they are getting in trouble at school.
The teachers authority comes from the Parents! If you don't support your teachers ability to chastize your child when necessary, they will not be able to teach your child effectively. That requires you to be the Bad Guy at home and force them to study, do homework, and respect their teachers.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Teachers have *minimum* 4 year degrees, the median household doesn't. You can only pro-rate a teachers salary like that by counting days, not hours - and teachers are paid hourly.
Did you miss the part where the average salary with a bachelors degree is $45000? And why can't you pro-rate the salary? On average teachers make over $51,000 a year. That means when you add up the money they get paid for their hourly wage the average teacher makes a little over $51,000 a year. If they worked the additional hours the two to three months they have off at the hourly wage they are paid, they would make approximately $68,000 a year. Teacher's are well paid, as they should be.
The problem with education in the U.S. has nothing to do with teachers' salaries.
All that being said, the copyright on the lesson plans developed by a teacher should belong to the teacher. If someone wants to pay that teacher for that lesson plan, that money belongs to that teacher, not the school.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I don't know about you, but my job cannot claim copyright or ownership of any of the work I do outside the office. And of the couple dozen teachers I know, only a couple of them write up their lesson plans during "contract hours" (the hours they are contracted to work).
If someone makes a lesson plan at 9pm at night, why in hell does the government have any say in how its used?
Now, I'm a fan of openness and sharing and I'd love to see a Public Domain (or GPLed) repository of good lesson plans, but your argument that the government has any ownership of these ideas is based on the (laughably) misguided idea that teachers write lesson plans during the day.
And, as for your "supply and demand" comment, I could argue the exact opposite: If teachers were paid more, more qualified people would consider it as a career option instead of anything else. The rate of attrition for teachers suggests that view is perhaps a little more reasonable.
"We should be paying teachers twice what they are now and expecting the very best for it."
I agree. But that is not going to happen until we can get rid of the teachers unions. They ensure that bad teachers do not get fired, and that all teachers are paid the same without regard to talent. Basically the opposite of a meritocracy.
Expecting anything other than mediocrity under those conditions is a denial of reality.
How is it that every single teacher makes less than the average wage of a public school teacher? Based on the anecdotale evidence, there must be some tiny secret group of public school teachers that make several hundred thousand dollars a year.
You are a stupid fuck. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's have a rational argument:
Creationism is not science, it's religion. You have no scientific evidence or support of creationism. Thus, there is not a valid challenge here. Science is still science because it does not address anything that cannot be investigated scientifically. Just as science cannot issue a valid challenge to religion (as any scientific claim is countered with "god did it that way to test us" or similar) religion cannot issue a valid challenge to science (as any religious claim can not be supported with scientific evidence).
Go ahead and teach creationism in bible study or a religious studies class, but it is not science and therefore should not be taught in science class.
Furthermore, evolution makes absolutely no statement about the origins of the universe. The theory you're looking for is called "the big bang", not evolution. Thus, any challenge religion attempts (I say attempts because it cannot, as shown above, actually issue a valid challenge) to have against evolution regarding the origin of the universe is invalid because it has nothing to do with the beginning of the universe. You might as well try to argue the creation of the universe against the intermediate value theorem (a calculus concept), it simply makes no sense.
As for the disclaimers put on textbooks, they make no sense either. Nothing in science can ever be proven absolutely for every situation. It's simply that the effect is observed and the calculations are shown to be correct for every imaginable instance and thus we call it a "theory". We cannot prove that gravity exists absolutely everywhere in the entire universe, but every single experiment ever conducted has shown it to be true. We see it here on earth, on the moon, we can see the effects of gravity on the stars, etc. It is possible, although very, very, unlikely that one day we will discover a piece of matter that does not act like it should with respect to gravity. If and when that time comes, the theory of gravity will have to be reworked.
However, it should be noted that science is not simply "I observe this effect, therefore we'll call it a theory". There is experimentation, calculation, etc. All experiments MUST be repeatable. All calculations MUST be verifiable. Religion is neither of these things. We can't test for god (or the lack of it). If we could, the experiment wouldn't be repeatable. For example, let's say there was a case of cancer in a patient that suddenly went into remission, 6 months later the patient is cancer free. You say "it was a miracle from god". We can't test for this. There's no experiment we can do that will show a divine influence on the patient. It's also not repeatable. If we give another patient cancer in the exact same way, the miracle would not happen twice. (We know this because there are a lot of people with cancer and this hasn't happened before).
In short, "god did it" is not science, it's religion.
As for abstinence only sex education. You're presenting a straw man argument. No one is encouraging teenagers to have sex before marriage. Furthermore, no one is suggesting that teen pregnancy is a good thing. These are not arguments presented by your opposition and therefore warrant no further consideration. (The fact that you mentioned them means that you are either confused about the arguments actually being presented, or that you are intentionally attempting to mislead your opposition).
Your statement about "most abstinence organizations... birth control methods" has no support. Please provide a link to some study that was done or something similar. unfortunately, I cannot take your word for it, just as I don't expect you to take mine if I were to say "most abstinence organizations do NOT teach birth control methods". I also cannot take your word that you are a former president of an abstinence organization, just as I don't expect you to take mine if I say "I am a former king of England
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.