The problem with "teachers pay teachers"
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Anonymous
And teachers wonder why no one respects us? Maybe since it's so easy to do our job, we should just all quit and have the monkeys take over. Signed, A teacher (who has a masters degree from an Ivy and is currently in a doctorate program) |
Anonymous
+1 A teacher long out of the classroom with Masters' Plus and who hates spelling errors and would never give the kids worksheets with those kinds of errors on them. And, FWIW, you'd be surprised how many errors you can also find in textbooks............of course, you have to look for them. |
Anonymous
Teachers usually can’t view the entire TPT product until after purchase; they can only preview low-resolution pictures of pages that the seller chooses to show. Unfortunately, we’ve already spent our money on un-editable PDF’s when we discover the errors in many cases. Sometimes it’s best to just explain directions aloud rather than try to white-out and rewrite extensive portions of text. While the star ratings and reviews might be helpful in some cases, much of the time the information is a bit shallow, like what you find on Amazon or other large websites. That said, it’s not the end of the world if printed materials aren’t perfect. The errors usually don’t interfere with lesson goals, and teachers are there to guide students through the lesson activities. Textbook company materials, when they exist, can have their own issues — not developmentally appropriate, contain too many multi-step directions, not engaging, lack of differentiated materials, among other problems. Before TPT, most teachers created their own materials. We usually didn’t have editors either, and some of us were particularly error-prone as we rushed to the photocopier during planning periods or at 4 p.m. Not all of us were gifted with formatting or graphics either. I had an elementary school teacher who always taught the same lesson on the same day every year. She’d dust off her January 8 file folder, take out the worksheets, and start teaching. Expectations for current teaching are different. We need to differentiate for learning differences, grade-level learners, and high achievers. There’s an expectation that learning activities will vary and that children will spend more time doing than listening. If teaching isn’t engaging, both students and parents are dissatisfied. At the same time, there’s very little money to buy pre-packaged curricula and materials to facilitate this shift. Imperfections aside, TPT isn’t going anywhere because it’s a relatively inexpensive and time efficient way to get the materials that teachers are expected to stock our classrooms with. |
Anonymous
+1 Teacher with two Ivy degrees. |
Anonymous
| TPT preys upon new teachers with no support and no idea what they're doing and teachers who are so overburdened with large classes or data or behavioral issues or whatever that they have no time or ability to create their own materials. It's largely a wasteland. I am a teacher and I don't know anyone who uses it. I don't use textbooks or canned curriculum or standard materials either; I create everything I use. I understand not everyone can do so but TPT is just a lot of garbage, most of it plagiarized or a violation of copyrighted material at that. |
Anonymous
I totally agree. Plus, they are not differentiated for sped/esl. I am a teacher/specialist. |
Anonymous
| I've purchased many items on TPT and none of them had typos. I've read reviews where someone mentioned a typo but the seller commented that it was fixed as of _______ date. We don't have a curriculum and have limited resources so it is necessary or I would never leave school. I would have to create everything from scratch times 4 classes per day. Nope. |
Anonymous
You have no idea how many teachers fight this though. They want to teach what they want to teach. Have you not seen the thousand posters from all over the US complaining about teaching to the test and how awful Pearson is? How cookie cutter a bought curriculum is? No one can speak in shades of grey anymore. It's like they've completely forgotten that teachers used to have curriculum materials given to them AND they had the option of providing their own. I remember being in a meeting with the reading resource teacher to find out that she spent 80% of her time creating reading lesson plans for teachers. She showed me one she had been working all day on for writing a fairy tale as if that had never been done before in 4th grade. I asked "aren't you helping students with reading?" and the answer was that most of the individual reading help was done by the teacher and not the reading resource. The reading resource was there to support the teachers. True story. |
Anonymous
20:08 again. I remember one more detail. The fairy tale was also teaching dialogue. Needed an entire day planning session to produce a lesson plan for teaching a fairy tale with dialogue. I blame the teachers. All the teachers at our school are given the option of having curriculum materials given to them and they choose not to use them. We are an AAP center and the teachers use none of the AAP materials. It's infuriating. We have history books sitting on the side of the classrooms opened less than 3 times a year. The materials they provide in their place are not better and take more time. |
Anonymous
| Well, it could be worse. In MCPS, the central office created the curriculum and those materials had more errors than the free sites. You were required to use them and if you complained you suffered from retaliation. Seven years of BS and teachers complaining. They did nothing until the external audit found the exact same thing that teachers and parents were complaining about for all seven years. |
Anonymous
But weren't those materials created by several teachers within the system? And there was an active program to update them and find those errors with teacher input? And each teacher had at least 3 different materials to choose from for each type of lesson so it wasn't completely cookie cutter and I believe they could also supplement. Teachers I know in MCPS say they have all sorts of resources to pull from and many staff to help them develop lessons. Other school systems don't bother to audit their own teaching materials. The fact that MCPS had the courage to do that shows me that they were working to perfect their system. |
Anonymous
| In fact other systems don't even know what their teachers are using for materials. |
Anonymous
| This is a typical DCUM school thread full of parents who know nothing about teaching or how the education system works spouting off as if they do. |
Anonymous
This. As a teacher, I just sit back and laugh. |
Anonymous
| TPT exists when schools moved away from traditional textbooks and workbooks. When I was in school, we had spelling, reading (basal), math, science and social studies textbooks. Teachers didn't do much differentiation except ability grouping. So maybe one math class moved faster through the book than another class. Or our reading groups were in different parts of the basal. Without many materials to use and the expectation that we differentiate for every single student, TPT fills the gap. I wouldn't have time to create materials for 4-5 math and reading groups each day. I will use it until the district provides us with what we need to teach. I haven't come across many typos in what I buy but my principal has at least one typo in each weekly newsletter. |