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?
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.
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.
Come on, as someone who was a teacher for a while, lives with a teacher, and knows lots of teachers this is very atypical. Nobody would be doing all of these things every day, or even once a week. It is also quite common to have a number of free periods each day, one day a week I had 3 hours off.
judging by her salary and over-excitement, she must be new. After a while, she most likely will realize all that work is unnecessary and work more effectively (or burnout completely).
Almost all good teachers start out with something approaching that level of work. It is only by going through that phase that they have the backlog and repertoire ready in advance later on. It can be a brutally hard profession.
I know a teacher that has to regularly submit her hand-written lesson plans for the principal to review. That way the principal thinks she can be sure that the teachers are creating their own lesson plans late at night.
I do that kind of workload a couple of weeks a year at 'crunch' times in the UK academic calendar, I could not sustain that long term as a result of care responsibilities let alone exhaustion.
Suggest using those meetings with colleagues to explore team planning. Leverage a good lesson by using it with more classes at same level/subject.
Assessment ('grading' in American): any scope for MCQ or self/peer assessment?
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.
They also don't get any benefits from FICA and medicare. That pension they pay into is supposed to cover all of that but costs more than FICA and Medicare.
And much like a teacher "gets off work at 3pm" they do in fact work year round. They may not be in the classroom, but in the summer they are usually going to workshops and conferences and doing long term lesson planning for the coming year.
The teachers I know must be total slackers. Workshops and conferences all summer long? Really?
Fact remains that most lesson planning involves repurposing old material. It is never from a clean slate and now with testing pushed so much there is little time for a flexible curriculum. How many times are you going to rewrite the fractions lesson?
Next response will state that teachers actually work more than 365 days a year as they have mastered time travel. I respect teachers, but blind statements that they work so much actually does more harm than good. Work smart, not hard. Which is why people are buying lesson plans than writing their own. And going on vacation instead of that boring workshop.
"How many times are you going to rewrite the fractions lesson?"
If I 'teach' the lesson, not very often.
If I want each and every student to understand the concept of proportion, and each student be able to use fractions and ratios effectively, I'll need to adjust the presentation, sequence, style and approach a lot of times, quite possibly on the fly in the classroom.
Now, how many programming languages and code libraries do we really need?
Total compensation per hour for elementary/secondary school teachers: 56.59 (and avg wage is 38.39); far higher than any other public position (save administrators - they get cake too).
I'm not sure I believe that number. I guess some super highly-paid regions are throwing off the average.
Starting teacher salary in my district is $42,000 per year for a 187-day contract. Assuming the teachers only work 7 hours a day (which is insultingly low; my first year teaching I worked 60-70 hours a week): 42000 / 7 * 187 = $32.09 per hour.
I think if you (wrongly, IMO) assume that all teachers in America work only the hours that they're on the clock in front of children, then MAYBE that number is believable. But that's not the reality of the teaching profession, in my experience.
Edit: I see that number is "total compensation", which presumably includes health care and such. I don't know how to meaningfully add that to my estimate, but it would certainly increase it.
Most teachers (almost be definition) aren't earning the "starting" salary. Salary scales fairly nicely with seniority and "professional development" (those summer workshops and conferences).
I left teaching physics after five years for a much higher salary in the tech sector. I work average 9.5 hours a day now. It is so much less draining than teaching. Working very hard here is incomparably preferable from a quality of life perspective, even with summer break taken into consideration.
That essay is garbage in my opinion. My wife and many of our friends are teachers and it doesn't take into account things like lesson plans and grading papers - both Of which are typically done on the teachers personal time (at least in Florida and with elementary aged kids).
In other words, although other professions are as likely to work from home or other places, it fails to mention the amount of hours that teachers DO work outside the office - at least the good ones that actually care. In the same breath there are many teachers who just skate by because they know they won't get fired.
The essay also doesn't take into account the length of a teachers workday nor the nature of the work. When my wife taught she had to arrive at 6:30am and often didn't get home until 4:30 or 5:00pm on a good day. Have you ever tryed to entertain twenty 7-year-olds for 10 hours? It's pretty exhausting - not to mention the fact that they also have to deal with the administration requirements, parents, standardized testing, other bad teachers that never will lose their jobs, etc. All for 34k per year before taxes.
Say it's 11:23am and you need to use the restroom. Sorry, you can't exactly just walk out of class to run down the hall. You have to wait until your 20 minute lunch break which includes walking the kids to and from the lunchroom.
Just to give some perspective, this is such a problem where we live that that I know or know of nearly a dozen teachers no longer in the classroom or looking for other employment.
For those teachers who feel they are living the life, I'd love to know where they live because from where I sit summers odd is about the best thing going for teachers.
That essay is garbage in my opinion...it doesn't take into account things like lesson plans and grading papers - both Of which are typically done on the teachers personal time...
It helps to read a report all the way to paragraph 2 before determining it is garbage.
"Because of the way in which the data are collected, it is possible to identify and quantify the work that teachers do at home, at a workplace, and at other locations and to examine the data by
day of the week and time of day"
It's possible you work more than average, in which case there are others who who work less than average. Or perhaps you just overestimate the work you put in (same as most people do).
Okay, so I read the entire report. I'd love to see the standard deviation for the "minutes worked per day" figure. I'd bet that it is high.
I've worked in public education for fifteen years, and I know almost no teachers who work as little as the "average" quoted in the BLS results.
But then I work for a "good" school (top 100 in my State, nearly top 1000 in the US). I suspect the difference between the data (which I'm sure is accurate) and my experience boils down to "Good teachers work a lot of hours. Many (most?) of the teachers in America are not good."
I guess I missed that when viewing on my phone. I went straight to the meat and potatoes. Touche to that. From my first and second hand experiences, I still feel that it is not accurate.
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."
No, this is incorrect. The site creator has earned between 40% and 15% of that 7 million as a fee. One particular teacher has earned $700k by selling her lesson plans through the site.
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.
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.
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?
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.
