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Kindergarten Teacher Earns $700,000 by Selling Lesson Plans Online

136 points by MarlonPro 14y ago

MarlonPro 14y ago
Startup Ideas: Find what people need and build an app/product that will fill those needs = $$$$
- patio11 14y ago
  As the resident "Been there, done that" guy with regards to teachers I think I'm 99.9% of the way to "You should probably build something for businesses instead -- for equivalent levels of savvy/work you'll get a lot more money while suffering a lot less." Teachers: $$ Businesses: $$$$$$$$$$$ I just got an email this morning from someone responding to an AdWords ad for Appointment Reminder. The ad costs $8 a click, for reasons which will soon be obvious. The contents of the email: "Quote me a price for X appointmnts a month." I did. "OK, we want it." If they stay around for the year I just earned several hundred copies of BCC with two emails and a few minutes of data entry.
  - MarkMc 14y ago
    Hey Patrick it's great to hear that Appointment Reminder is doing well - congratulations!
tokenadult 14y ago
I saw this link just after MarlonPro did, in the feed of a Facebook friend who is an author on homeschooling. One comment by one of her friends was, "Perpetuating lesson plans that may or may not actually be interesting to a child and may actually turn a child off a topic? The teacher can keep her big bucks. . . . although, wonder if you could do plans that promote independent learning?" It is interesting to think about what could be involved in lesson plans for kindergarten, http://www.mrsjumpsclass.com/ http://www.mrsjumpsclass.com/ http://mrsjumpsclass.blogspot.com/ http://mrsjumpsclass.blogspot.com/ and what puts kindergarten teachers, who are graduates of college major programs in education in the usual case, in need of lesson plans for their young pupils. Is there room for a lot of other market entrants in this market?
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  Pretty negative - so the lesson plans are crap, they don't promote independent learming, the children are not interested. You read all that from the article? Why not buy one, check it out? They are cheap, many are free. Its easy to criticise, but almost as easy to have an informed opinion. I can imagine many new teachers are glad to have an experienced educator guide them. It can be challenging to have a fresh plan 180 days in a row. At the least, these plans provide another viewpoint.
  - tokenadult 14y ago
    Thanks for your comment. I found more context about the teacher profiled in the Mashable article in this older article from an Education Week blog: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2011/09/teacher_makes_230000_on_lesson_plans.html http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2011/09/teache... My initial surprise at the announcement that lesson plans sell that well stems from 1) writing my own lesson plans, adapted to a particular group of students I teach, and thus 2) thinking, don't most teachers plan their lessons for their particular class, with its individual mix of students? while also knowing 3) many materials provided by textbook publishers have somewhat of built-in lesson plans. So I'm still surprised to see that the market is as large as it evidently is for canned lesson plans, but it is, and it appears that other teachers ought to enter it.
    - JonnieCache 14y ago
      Just because you've purchased a canned lesson plan doesn't mean you have to implement it exactly. I imagine a lot of teachers are buying the plans to avoid 80% of the work, and then adjusting them to fit their specific pupils. And some of them are probably lazily teaching them straight off the shelf as well. So it goes.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    What puts college educated computer programmers in need of design docs and standard libraries? Shouldn't they write their own?
- 14y ago
kghose 14y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. I lived in India for almost a decade - Calcutta to be precise, but I think what I have to say applies to most of India. What happens is that Teachers in schools start tutorial classes. Either singly or in groups they set up tutorial homes and they recruit students from their day jobs. Often there is a hidden implication that if you don't join the tutorial (for which, of course you pay extra money) you will fare poorly in class. At best, the teachers put less effort into their regular job and students suffer. I would hate for this system to be adopted widely. Putting stuff online is a little different, but I am very ambivalent about this kind of privatization of education...
- robryan 14y ago
  I don't think this is really a worry in Australia at least. Often teachers are left coming up with lesson plans on the fly and the students suffer. My partner is studying to become a primary school teacher and one thing that has surprised me is the level of duplication in the system. At an individual school a couple of teachers teaching the same year level are coming up with a lesson plan. There are hundreds of other schools essentially teaching to the same framework. Now I'm not advocating a completely standardised curriculum with no room for the teacher to put their own individual style in the lessons. What I am saying though is that I think everyone would benefit if there was much more sharing of knowledge throughout the system. Something like this site enables that knowledge sharing.
  - sonnymai 14y ago
    Yeh, my partner is also becoming a primary school teacher in Australia. I also noticed the duplication with lesson plans they were having when they went to do their practical components at schools. So I built a little app[1] to help her and her colleagues create lesson plans and share it with each other. No intention of monetising it, just wanted to learn some mongodb and rails with it. [1] https://www.lessplan.com/ https://www.lessplan.com/ (use invite code: beta-212 if anyone wants to play around)
- praxulus 14y ago
  It's not the students that are paying to be taught, it's the teachers/schools that are paying to reduce (or perhaps refocus) the teacher's workload. Instead of coming up with lesson plan from scratch, the teacher can start with something usually better than they would have come up with on their own, and spend their time tailoring it to the strengths and weaknesses of their class, or even specific students. Or maybe they can spend more time giving feedback on students' assignments.
blinkingled 14y ago
So what does this offer that Khan Academy doesn't for free? Looks like they manage to use social media effectively and I haven't checked but may be they have more targeted or traditional education friendly content over there?
- eddie_the_head 14y ago
  Khan Academy does not offer lesson plans, just videos and an exercise/practice framework. This is marketplace for teachers to sell and buy lesson plans. Things like worksheets for in-class work, homework to assign, ideas for projects to assign, or material to supplement in-class instruction for the students. This is actually a really smart and obvious idea, and well executed it seems.
brianobush 14y ago
Of course, tax payers most likely footed the bill for her to come up with those lesson plans.
- encoderer 14y ago
  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.
  - eupharis 14y ago
    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."
    - heroprotagonist 14y ago
      According to the article, teachers sold $7 million in lesson plans. The site creator has earned $700k.
      - Simucal 14y ago
        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.
  - wcchandler 14y ago
    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.
protomyth 14y ago
Long ago, I built a lesson plan generator for the LAP and e-LAP skill tests (0-3 year olds). The teachers each put their activities designed to improve a skill and it would print out the needed activities for each child after testing. It was quite the hit. Never did go commercial, bit it did save a lot of time and provided a weird form of networking via activity sharing across centers. Lesson plans are a big issue for pre-K also. You tend to have to do the plans in a much more individualized way with not all of the kids at once. It was quite a challenge just finding time to write up the plans based on the tests. Automation was a huge gain.
e28eta 14y ago
I really don't understand the negativity here. I'm no expert on teaching, but I've definitely heard that some teachers come up with lesson plans in their first couple years teaching a subject, and then just re-use it for the rest of their career (or until the standardized test changes). This seems like a huge waste of effort, because there are so many other teachers covering the same content, with largely similar lesson plans. If customization is so important, what's wrong with applying it to a purchased lesson plan?
michaelfeathers 14y ago
I'm surprised school systems aren't claiming "work for hire" copyright on the lesson plans. I don't think they should, it's just that this is the way that these things typically play out.
- fromhet 14y ago
  The type of thing OP is talking about is actually quite common in Sweden, but as a non-profit (on the teachers behalf, that is). My mother is a teacher and I've worked in a school, and the use of http://www.lektion.se/ http://www.lektion.se/ is very widespread. All the class plans there are free (as in money).
- VikingCoder 14y ago
  Many teachers are currently unemployed.
piato 14y ago
I may be missing something rather obvious here, but I've read the article three times, and can find no reference to 'coaching' or 'after-school tutorials' at all here. Are they mentioned elsewhere? As a former teacher, here is an example lesson plan: AGE GROUP: Year 5 TOPIC: Introducing prime numbers STARTER: Mixed multiplication table questions on board. MAIN ACTIVITY: Write the number 92 on the board. Ask students whether '92' appears in any multiplication table. When the answer '2' is received, stress that multiplication tables do not end at 10 or 12, but continue on indefinitely. Repeat for the numbers '999', '186', and '495'. Next, write the number 71 on the board. Students will conclude that it does not appear in any 'tables'. Explain that it does, offering a reward for the first correct answer. With or without hinting, get the answer '1' or '71'. Offering a second reward, get the second of the pair. Explain that every whole number is in the 'one' times table and the 'itself' times table. However, such numbers are called 'prime' if those are the only ones. Ask students to name other prime numbers below 50, discussing suggestions. Complete is_it_prime.doc. Students who finish quickly should attempt is_it_prime_2.doc. That's not meant to be particularly inspiring or anything, just representative. As a teacher, you have a legal obligation to have such a plan for every lesson you teach (this was true in the UK, can't speak for other countries).
- keithpeter 14y ago
  You would need a little more than that now. Differentiated outcomes &c I get the impression that in the US they don't have a national curriculum or external exams &c so the teacher has to do more long term planning on their own.
andyobryan 14y ago
I forwarded this to my mother, who is a retired teacher. She was lauded for her teaching abilities and always had top scores on her evaluations. They even tried to get her to stay upon reaching the required years to retire, but health / back issues forced her to retire. I thought this would be great for some post-retirement income. She has years of experience, so possibly, the planning part would come easy to her AND the side benefit of not actually having to TEACH the little stink-pots...
Drbble 14y ago
Teachers Pay Teachers, DonorsChoose interesting that these teacher startups are founded by males from a female dominated starting industry.

136 points by MarlonPro 14y ago

MarlonPro 14y ago

Startup Ideas: Find what people need and build an app/product that will fill those needs = $$$$

patio11 14y ago
As the resident "Been there, done that" guy with regards to teachers I think I'm 99.9% of the way to "You should probably build something for businesses instead -- for equivalent levels of savvy/work you'll get a lot more money while suffering a lot less." Teachers: $$ Businesses: $$$$$$$$$$$ I just got an email this morning from someone responding to an AdWords ad for Appointment Reminder. The ad costs $8 a click, for reasons which will soon be obvious. The contents of the email: "Quote me a price for X appointmnts a month." I did. "OK, we want it." If they stay around for the year I just earned several hundred copies of BCC with two emails and a few minutes of data entry.
- MarkMc 14y ago
  Hey Patrick it's great to hear that Appointment Reminder is doing well - congratulations!

tokenadult 14y ago

I saw this link just after MarlonPro did, in the feed of a Facebook friend who is an author on homeschooling. One comment by one of her friends was, "Perpetuating lesson plans that may or may not actually be interesting to a child and may actually turn a child off a topic? The teacher can keep her big bucks. . . . although, wonder if you could do plans that promote independent learning?" It is interesting to think about what could be involved in lesson plans for kindergarten, http://www.mrsjumpsclass.com/ http://www.mrsjumpsclass.com/ http://mrsjumpsclass.blogspot.com/ http://mrsjumpsclass.blogspot.com/ and what puts kindergarten teachers, who are graduates of college major programs in education in the usual case, in need of lesson plans for their young pupils. Is there room for a lot of other market entrants in this market?

JoeAltmaier 14y ago
Pretty negative - so the lesson plans are crap, they don't promote independent learming, the children are not interested. You read all that from the article? Why not buy one, check it out? They are cheap, many are free. Its easy to criticise, but almost as easy to have an informed opinion. I can imagine many new teachers are glad to have an experienced educator guide them. It can be challenging to have a fresh plan 180 days in a row. At the least, these plans provide another viewpoint.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Thanks for your comment. I found more context about the teacher profiled in the Mashable article in this older article from an Education Week blog: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2011/09/teacher_makes_230000_on_lesson_plans.html http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2011/09/teache... My initial surprise at the announcement that lesson plans sell that well stems from 1) writing my own lesson plans, adapted to a particular group of students I teach, and thus 2) thinking, don't most teachers plan their lessons for their particular class, with its individual mix of students? while also knowing 3) many materials provided by textbook publishers have somewhat of built-in lesson plans. So I'm still surprised to see that the market is as large as it evidently is for canned lesson plans, but it is, and it appears that other teachers ought to enter it.
  - JonnieCache 14y ago
    Just because you've purchased a canned lesson plan doesn't mean you have to implement it exactly. I imagine a lot of teachers are buying the plans to avoid 80% of the work, and then adjusting them to fit their specific pupils. And some of them are probably lazily teaching them straight off the shelf as well. So it goes.
- Drbble 14y ago
  What puts college educated computer programmers in need of design docs and standard libraries? Shouldn't they write their own?
14y ago

kghose 14y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. I lived in India for almost a decade - Calcutta to be precise, but I think what I have to say applies to most of India. What happens is that Teachers in schools start tutorial classes. Either singly or in groups they set up tutorial homes and they recruit students from their day jobs. Often there is a hidden implication that if you don't join the tutorial (for which, of course you pay extra money) you will fare poorly in class. At best, the teachers put less effort into their regular job and students suffer. I would hate for this system to be adopted widely. Putting stuff online is a little different, but I am very ambivalent about this kind of privatization of education...

robryan 14y ago
I don't think this is really a worry in Australia at least. Often teachers are left coming up with lesson plans on the fly and the students suffer. My partner is studying to become a primary school teacher and one thing that has surprised me is the level of duplication in the system. At an individual school a couple of teachers teaching the same year level are coming up with a lesson plan. There are hundreds of other schools essentially teaching to the same framework. Now I'm not advocating a completely standardised curriculum with no room for the teacher to put their own individual style in the lessons. What I am saying though is that I think everyone would benefit if there was much more sharing of knowledge throughout the system. Something like this site enables that knowledge sharing.
- sonnymai 14y ago
  Yeh, my partner is also becoming a primary school teacher in Australia. I also noticed the duplication with lesson plans they were having when they went to do their practical components at schools. So I built a little app[1] to help her and her colleagues create lesson plans and share it with each other. No intention of monetising it, just wanted to learn some mongodb and rails with it. [1] https://www.lessplan.com/ https://www.lessplan.com/ (use invite code: beta-212 if anyone wants to play around)
praxulus 14y ago
It's not the students that are paying to be taught, it's the teachers/schools that are paying to reduce (or perhaps refocus) the teacher's workload. Instead of coming up with lesson plan from scratch, the teacher can start with something usually better than they would have come up with on their own, and spend their time tailoring it to the strengths and weaknesses of their class, or even specific students. Or maybe they can spend more time giving feedback on students' assignments.

blinkingled 14y ago

So what does this offer that Khan Academy doesn't for free? Looks like they manage to use social media effectively and I haven't checked but may be they have more targeted or traditional education friendly content over there?

eddie_the_head 14y ago
Khan Academy does not offer lesson plans, just videos and an exercise/practice framework. This is marketplace for teachers to sell and buy lesson plans. Things like worksheets for in-class work, homework to assign, ideas for projects to assign, or material to supplement in-class instruction for the students. This is actually a really smart and obvious idea, and well executed it seems.

brianobush 14y ago

Of course, tax payers most likely footed the bill for her to come up with those lesson plans.

encoderer 14y ago
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.
- eupharis 14y ago
  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."
  - heroprotagonist 14y ago
    According to the article, teachers sold $7 million in lesson plans. The site creator has earned $700k.
    - Simucal 14y ago
      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.
- wcchandler 14y ago
  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.

protomyth 14y ago

Long ago, I built a lesson plan generator for the LAP and e-LAP skill tests (0-3 year olds). The teachers each put their activities designed to improve a skill and it would print out the needed activities for each child after testing. It was quite the hit. Never did go commercial, bit it did save a lot of time and provided a weird form of networking via activity sharing across centers. Lesson plans are a big issue for pre-K also. You tend to have to do the plans in a much more individualized way with not all of the kids at once. It was quite a challenge just finding time to write up the plans based on the tests. Automation was a huge gain.

e28eta 14y ago

I really don't understand the negativity here. I'm no expert on teaching, but I've definitely heard that some teachers come up with lesson plans in their first couple years teaching a subject, and then just re-use it for the rest of their career (or until the standardized test changes). This seems like a huge waste of effort, because there are so many other teachers covering the same content, with largely similar lesson plans. If customization is so important, what's wrong with applying it to a purchased lesson plan?

michaelfeathers 14y ago

I'm surprised school systems aren't claiming "work for hire" copyright on the lesson plans. I don't think they should, it's just that this is the way that these things typically play out.

fromhet 14y ago
The type of thing OP is talking about is actually quite common in Sweden, but as a non-profit (on the teachers behalf, that is). My mother is a teacher and I've worked in a school, and the use of http://www.lektion.se/ http://www.lektion.se/ is very widespread. All the class plans there are free (as in money).
VikingCoder 14y ago
Many teachers are currently unemployed.

piato 14y ago

I may be missing something rather obvious here, but I've read the article three times, and can find no reference to 'coaching' or 'after-school tutorials' at all here. Are they mentioned elsewhere? As a former teacher, here is an example lesson plan: AGE GROUP: Year 5 TOPIC: Introducing prime numbers STARTER: Mixed multiplication table questions on board. MAIN ACTIVITY: Write the number 92 on the board. Ask students whether '92' appears in any multiplication table. When the answer '2' is received, stress that multiplication tables do not end at 10 or 12, but continue on indefinitely. Repeat for the numbers '999', '186', and '495'. Next, write the number 71 on the board. Students will conclude that it does not appear in any 'tables'. Explain that it does, offering a reward for the first correct answer. With or without hinting, get the answer '1' or '71'. Offering a second reward, get the second of the pair. Explain that every whole number is in the 'one' times table and the 'itself' times table. However, such numbers are called 'prime' if those are the only ones. Ask students to name other prime numbers below 50, discussing suggestions. Complete is_it_prime.doc. Students who finish quickly should attempt is_it_prime_2.doc. That's not meant to be particularly inspiring or anything, just representative. As a teacher, you have a legal obligation to have such a plan for every lesson you teach (this was true in the UK, can't speak for other countries).

keithpeter 14y ago
You would need a little more than that now. Differentiated outcomes &c I get the impression that in the US they don't have a national curriculum or external exams &c so the teacher has to do more long term planning on their own.

andyobryan 14y ago

I forwarded this to my mother, who is a retired teacher. She was lauded for her teaching abilities and always had top scores on her evaluations. They even tried to get her to stay upon reaching the required years to retire, but health / back issues forced her to retire. I thought this would be great for some post-retirement income. She has years of experience, so possibly, the planning part would come easy to her AND the side benefit of not actually having to TEACH the little stink-pots...

Drbble 14y ago

Teachers Pay Teachers, DonorsChoose interesting that these teacher startups are founded by males from a female dominated starting industry.