Slashdot Mirror
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."
Teachers are being paid to teach. They are not being paid to create lesson plans. I am not a full time teacher, but I have taught, and I can tell you that when I do I regularly use lesson plans that I have created at previous schools or in my free time when I not working for anyone (but know I will be teaching again someday down the line). And, yes, sometimes I have even downloaded plans off of the web. How could a school I teach at claim ownership over this work? In my mind this would be like club owners claiming to own the rights to any music that is played at their venues.
Faculty at public universities still own their royalties. School teachers and university faculty are not so different. Both are professionals and both get tenure in most states. If a school district gave a teacher release time and specific instructions to develop a lesson plan, that would be work for hire. Much more frequently, the school district just assumes that the teacher will make preparations on their own time. In that case, it is not work for hire. If you want to pay teachers overtime for all the work they put in at home preparing for class, I am sure a lot of teachers would be happy to see the additional pay. But if the teacher does work on their own time, they should own their intellectual property.
Statesman
I agree - teachers are paid far too little (and no, I'm not a teacher either). How's this for a solution: upon graduation from high school you pick 3 teachers that have been the most influential in your life. 0.1% of your income thereafter (until all three have passed away) is divided amongst those teachers. With about 100 students per year, some of them presumably going on to become successful, it could add up to a fair chunk of change. Good teachers could actually earn a good wage that way (whoever Bill Gates chooses could become rich), and bad teachers would very quickly find themselves on the lower end of the income curve, perhaps making a system that actually removes bad teachers from the fold.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.