Not directly a boarding school story, but certainly appealing to any teacher, or teacher’s family member, who knows the routine of working on the next day’s lesson at home that evening.

Warner Robbins, GA kindergarten teacher Deanna Jump has become a lesson plan rock star through the online marketplace, Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT).

From Bloomberg (How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans):

“Since signing on to the site, she [Jump] has created 93 separate teaching units and sold 161,000 copies for about $8 a pop. ‘My units usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,’ [Jump] she says. ‘So if you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need from language arts, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources. So once you print out the unit, you just have to add a few books to read aloud to your class, and everything else is there, ready to go for you.’”(Bloomberg)

Teachers Pay Teachers makes it possible. A former middle school teacher, TPT founder Paul Edelman knows his audience, telling Bloomberg:

“Every night, I would spend two or three hours, at least—and then Sundays I would spend all day and all night preparing and correcting papers.” (Bloomberg)

“After four years in the classroom, Edelman hit upon the idea for an online lesson-plan marketplace. ‘I thought teachers would be more incentivized to post their best stuff and to create even higher quality materials if they had the opportunity to get paid for them…I had no clue what I was doing, but I knew it was a really good idea, so I just found my way.’” (Bloomberg)

As a teacher, the Internet as a tool is the most interesting angle in the this story.

Back in the day, we teachers toiled- far to often- as isolated individuals. The best we could do was call each other in the evening and chat as department. Now, if you’ve got a question, you can reach any good reference and resources like Jump’s are there for the use.