
A Sharing Economy Where Teachers Win - kareemm
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/technology/a-sharing-economy-where-teachers-win.html?_r=0
======
tokenadult
I am a teacher, and I looked at those lesson plans the last time this was in
the news. Most of the lesson plans were crap--I fear for a world in which many
teachers pay money for crap like that because they aren't even able to make
crap like that on their own.

The main reason I can neither be a customer nor a seller in a marketplace for
teachers' lesson plans is that I use rarely used (that is, actually good)
curricular materials for teaching mathematics at the "prealgebra" level,[1]
and few other teachers use those. Most other teachers who do use the same
materials I use are both smart enough to specify using those materials and
smart enough to write their own lesson plans individualized for the classes
they teach day by day.

[1]
[http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/store/item/prealgebra](http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/store/item/prealgebra)

[http://www.amazon.com/Math-Focus-Singapore-Teachers-
Edition/...](http://www.amazon.com/Math-Focus-Singapore-Teachers-
Edition/dp/0547561008)

~~~
lghh
My wife is a kindergarten teacher and absolutely loves TeacherPayTeachers. For
younger kids, the quality of stuff she finds is much higher than what I guess
you find for older kids' math. She uses is not because she can't make
materials, but because the ~$1 it costs to purchase material cuts about an
hour or two out of her several hours of planning and creating materials a
night that she does between 5-10 on weeknights.

------
aaron695
> A Sharing Economy

It's not a sharing economy. More like a free market breaking a government
controlled model.

Schools are monoliths impossible to move.

Teachers are agile.

The beauty is is skips around the government and goes straight to teachers,
the trick being prices are low enough teachers are also willing to skip the
government and pay for it from their own wages.

~~~
mseebach
"Sharing Economy" is a pretty incomplete term, but to the extend it means
anything, it means allowing people to turn otherwise idle or under-utilized
assets that exists anyway (cars, spare bedrooms, lesson plans) into productive
assets by providing a low-friction market place for them.

~~~
PretzelFisch
"Sharing Economy" doesn't really apply to lesson plans they are not an object
that must be shared it can be duplicated and used concurrently by an infinite
number of people.

~~~
mseebach
Again, "Sharing Economy" is, at best, an incomplete term, but lesson plans
absolutely are assets. The fact that they are easy to duplicate is immaterial
to this.

~~~
aaron695
I'd guess I see your point in that traditionally lesson plans are used once
and thrown away.

But I'd go as far as saying even if this site started this way now it's not.
The lessons are designed to sell, with the top sellers possibly longer
teachers.

------
germinalphrase
As a teacher I've looked into TpT in the past, but as an end-user it has
rarely saved me any time or effort. At best, documents could provide fresh
ideas - but document discoverability + adaptability feel severely inadequate.

What the success of this site does speak to is an underlaying desire by
educators to have a shared resource for the rapid
creation/adaptation/implementation of curriculum materials.

Teaching still remains a craft-based occupation and experienced educators
naturally want to individually create their own curriculum materials; however,
I believe this has less to do with the inherent inadequacy of shared documents
then it is the cumbersome nature of adapting someone else's documents to your
purposes. A strong teacher creates their curriculum documents based on the
specific needs/interests of their students (not the ones down the hall, or the
ones from last year) so even with the 'best' lesson materials they will need
the documents to remain flexible.

Yes - a Word .doc does this to a point, but even fighting the oddities of
formatting can be a sufficient enough time-suck to abandon the document and
begin from scratch. The document format should instead be a combination of
structural curricular patterns (sharable + driving discoverability through the
assigned utility of a given pattern [e.g. discussion pattern for groups of
four]) + instructor assigned style guide (largely automated in application
based on instructors previous style/formatting decisions). I couldn't care
less about your font/color choices (which may conflict with customs in my
classroom) - but I do care about the underlaying utility of your {activity,
introduction, guide, etc.}.

If it doesn't save me time (in doing something I'm already capable of) or
empower me to do something (I'm not otherwise able to do), then what's the
point?

------
nekopa
As a teacher, I tried this site out a few years ago[1], and it didn't work out
too well for us. Mainly because of timing and the fact that we didn't try to
market it at all. I may look into it again, but it almost feels like the old
stories of people making millions off of the app store, very few and far
between.

I was quite proud of the piece, worked a lot on the layout, and search far and
wide for public domain images to use. The friend and I who developed it have
used it in our own classes to great success.

If anyone wants a copy of it, my email is in my profile, or leave a comment
here and I will send it to you...

[1] [https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Dear-Santa-
You-S...](https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Dear-Santa-You-
Suck-472067)

------
buro9
If the original plans were made within contracted hours, do the teachers own
the rights to the work?

I ask this as my wife is an academic and I imagine her institution would not
take a favourable view of her selling access to resources that they are likely
to consider as owned by them.

~~~
lghh
I don't know if this is the case for upper grades, but my wife is a
kindergarten teacher and the idea that she has time to make lessons during her
contracted hours is really far from reality. In her contracted hours, she has
about 20 minutes to herself where she can sit down and eat and that's about
it. I remember in high school the teachers had about an hour during the day to
themselves, but I always heard that went straight to grading.

------
amelius
This seems like a business proposition that is not sustainable. (Simply
because of saturation, either through the service itself, or by other means,
such as open programs).

