As if teachers around the country don’t already have a lot on their plates, many of them are now taking on one more responsibility: Entrepreneur!
Some teachers earn 6 figures doing this…
Teaching is a profession where people are paid low wages for the amount of work and education necessary to do the job. Teachers have never received the level of respect they should. We as parents drop our kids off at a school and somehow expect the magic to happen to make our kids do math, reading, etc., and generally turn young people into potential scholars and productive adults.
There’s no doubt that teachers are undercompensated and underappreciated. But teachers are doing something about it themselves and becoming entrepreneurs. Call them ‘teacherpreneurs.’
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There’s a website called TeachersPayTeachers.com that allows a teacher who is a content expert in one field, say chemistry or math, to create lesson plans and share them with other teachers across the country for a price. (If you didn’t sleep through economics class, you know this is a classic example of a trade multiplier!)
The New York Times says 1.7 million lesson plans, quizzes, worksheets and more available on this website, typically for less than $5 a pop. But some of these teachepreneurs are making $100,000 annually selling their lesson plans! The company behind the site has paid out $175 million to teachers. (The site takes a 15% commission on all sales.)
We live in a world where there’s so much talk about the right way to compensate teachers. Then you have these national scandals where teachers end up fixing the results of student testing just to get higher pay. It can be hard to measure outstanding performance. But TeachersPayTeachers.com is the marketplace doing it, where academic peers say, ‘Hey, this is the best quiz I’ve ever seen and I’m going to buy it for my class.’
What’s your great idea that you can turn into cash and help others?
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