With the launch of the new site, I have lowered the monthly cost of membership in the PLC to $4.95/month. If you don’t see that reflected in your next payment statement from PayPal, let me know and I will fix it. Members not currently paying for membership, in the interest of overall fairness, will be asked to do so by the end of the week so that I can finally get the blog past the situation where, at one point, half the group was non-paying and the other half was paying.
I learned that if you work hard on something, you should be paid for it. It’s hard for teachers to get that, as we habitually work hard at all kinds of school activities, where, often, others down the hallway are doing nothing. I want to encourage those in the group who, like Robert, may sell stuff here, or on other websites, or on their own websites, to ask for remuneration for the work they do. If it has value to others, they should be paid for it.
I just now sent an email to Robert asking him to write a little book on how teachers who use comprehension methods can incorporate the magnificent world game of soccer into their instruction. It’s time for us to do that. Maybe something from Jeff Klamka on how to teach using the NCAA basketball tournament. Just little books but with small price tags on them.
The soccer idea is a good example of my point here, because Robert has put a lof of hours into developing that program, as he has on his emerging book North Sea Pirates, and I’m sure alot of other stuff as well that we haven’t yet seen, and he should be duly remunerated for that work if it is used in any way by others.
As we move forward as a group, various members, like Anne and Bryce and Jim already have, will continue to develop materials that may eventually be presented to the larger, world wide, TPRS community after being tested by our small group here. Some of those products, like North Sea Pirates, might definitely have a chance at being well-received out there, because we have a superior editing system available in “Ben’s List” and because being in a group like this stirs our creative talents in many ways on a daily basis.
We need to take the stance on our work that it deserves proper remuneration and that our time and talent is worth being paid for. In that way, we don’t act like the teachers of old. I used to be one. We need to learn to stop giving away our gold as if education and educational materials is an area where people just do that. It’s not and it shouldn’t be.
I once built an entire fitness trail system – during my own spring break – for a school in SC – an entire fitness trail! I worked ten hours a day on it with a handful of students as a kind of service project for the school. I think it is still there, in the land behind Heathwood Hall Episcopal School along the banks of the Congaree River in Columbia, SC. I found out years later that the principal never even knew that I had built it. What’s that all about?
I also used to run an annual state of the art Fine Arts Week for that school, raising money from the community and bringing in some of the best artists, up to 100 of them, to the school through the South Carolina Arts Commission. We just shut down the school for a week and did the things I organized. I used to think of it as community service and as a way of making the school better, but now I look back at it as little more than slave labor. I never asked a dime for the hundreds of hours I put in every year on that project.
I coached basketball, track and cross country as a head coach for years, even building a Soth Carolina state power in cross country, and in one year, as the head track coach of Myrtle Beach High School, I had a hand in producing three South Carolina state champions. One year, as a head basketball coach my team was 27-1. I think my average pay for those seasons was about $2.37 an hour.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. I will delete names from the PLC this weekend of anyone not paying for this membership. Others of us who spend hours and hours a day working on materials, please develop your products in an entrepreneurial spirit as well.
It’s not about being greedy, it’s about teachers finally saying to the world that the production of quality new materials for other teachers, products that have value to others, should not just be the domain of a few people in the TPRS world, nor should it be about allowing a few companies like Teacher’s Discovery to tell us what we should and should not buy for our classrooms and from whom. I am glad that our initial compelling need to have a private venue, a safe place to discuss volatile new ideas has teaching, has led me to understand these things.