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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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://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?

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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.

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/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.

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.

What puts college educated computer programmers in need of design docs and standard libraries? Shouldn't they write their own?

Funny because the majority of homeschoolers I know teach canned curriculum. The only real advantage for a homeschooler like that is that they can select the best curriculum for their individual kid(s) rather than having to select it for a whole classroom at a time. But a lot of times they just pick what their friends use so they can feel comfortable with their choice.

Could the lesson plans be open-sourced?

In the UK many teachers share activities (lesson planning is different here because of the frameworks we teach in). There are sharing sites like

http://www.skillsworkshop.org/

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resources/

and many teachers have their own Web sites.

I quite like the non-monetised sharing model, but I imagine HNers would be more interested in a commercial opportunity

It is free market. There are also open source lesson plans ("computerless cs" one) as well a libraries.

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