how many people feel fit to pontificate on this subject with absolutely no qualifications to do so.
I'm sorry, but teaching at a University is not remotely adequate. I got my MS in Mathematics, and have several PhD friends who have come to visit my classes. They UNIVERSALLY leave looking disheveled, muttering about how they don't understand how anyone can DO that all day long.
Many primary & secondary school teachers treat their curricula with a sort of defacto open-source model. They willingly share individual tricks, lesson plans, etc., with other teachers who ask. If they have been around the block, and their curricula is really robust, solid, complete, pick another adjective, then sometimes they package it up with a pretty bow and sell it at NCTM conferences. Someone else COULD do what they did, but it might be worth a few buck not to HAVE to.
As a teacher, it is appalling to me that folks seem to think teachers don't deserve to make a little side money. It has already been covered in previous posts that the "cushy" vacation scheme is not really the full picture. If you count the extra hours teachers work, we don't get much more time off than anyone else. We just take it all at once. And it has been my experience that most people who "claim" they work a 60 to 80 hour week do nothing of the sort. I am completely tied to my classroom for 12 hours every day. Sometimes I can't even go pee for 3 hours, because I can't afford the break, or because I have back-to-back classes (I work at a charter school, so we don't have a union). Forget about "coffee breaks" & whatever else all you normal people are allowed to take. If I didn't have the day off, you can bet your boots I wouldn't have time to be posting here.
Any public school that has the time to complain about teachers doing a sideline for material they created should be shut down for wasting their resources. If the school had it's act together enough to profit from creating curriculum, they should have been able to support the teacher in such a way that the teacher didn't need to create all their curriculum at home in the first place. Most schools don't have their act together, so kudos to their teachers for taking the initiative. It only yields good publicity for the school anyway - my school would love to claim that our math teachers' curriculum is being adopted by other schools, even if they weren't making any money from it.
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how many people feel fit to pontificate on this subject with absolutely no qualifications to do so.
I'm sorry, but teaching at a University is not remotely adequate. I got my MS in Mathematics, and have several PhD friends who have come to visit my classes. They UNIVERSALLY leave looking disheveled, muttering about how they don't understand how anyone can DO that all day long.
Many primary & secondary school teachers treat their curricula with a sort of defacto open-source model. They willingly share individual tricks, lesson plans, etc., with other teachers who ask. If they have been around the block, and their curricula is really robust, solid, complete, pick another adjective, then sometimes they package it up with a pretty bow and sell it at NCTM conferences. Someone else COULD do what they did, but it might be worth a few buck not to HAVE to.
As a teacher, it is appalling to me that folks seem to think teachers don't deserve to make a little side money. It has already been covered in previous posts that the "cushy" vacation scheme is not really the full picture. If you count the extra hours teachers work, we don't get much more time off than anyone else. We just take it all at once. And it has been my experience that most people who "claim" they work a 60 to 80 hour week do nothing of the sort. I am completely tied to my classroom for 12 hours every day. Sometimes I can't even go pee for 3 hours, because I can't afford the break, or because I have back-to-back classes (I work at a charter school, so we don't have a union). Forget about "coffee breaks" & whatever else all you normal people are allowed to take. If I didn't have the day off, you can bet your boots I wouldn't have time to be posting here.
Any public school that has the time to complain about teachers doing a sideline for material they created should be shut down for wasting their resources. If the school had it's act together enough to profit from creating curriculum, they should have been able to support the teacher in such a way that the teacher didn't need to create all their curriculum at home in the first place. Most schools don't have their act together, so kudos to their teachers for taking the initiative. It only yields good publicity for the school anyway - my school would love to claim that our math teachers' curriculum is being adopted by other schools, even if they weren't making any money from it.