TeachBay

Rebecca Moore Howard over at Schenectady Synecdoche just posted an email she received from one Paul Edelman, who identifies himself as the founder of Teacher Synergy Inc. Unsurprisingly, Moore Howard has been identified as a visible and authoritative researcher/teacher with a lot of good ideas and materials related to classroom practices, ideas and materials that Edelman wants to help her sell on a new website called "TEACHERSpayTEACHERS.com." Moore Howard's title for this entry is "Lordie.Pie." which I read as "There is so much to say about this email that I have no idea where to begin; please, just pass me my fan." Alternatively it could be read as "Lordie! (It's about time I get my piece of the) Pie!" But knowing Moore Howard's research and her political commitments (and also reading a slight Applachian-tinge in this phrase of taken-abackness) I'd have to go with the former reading. And I couldn't agree more.

But I will still enumerate a few things that are wrong with this idea, which Edelman claims to have already 'sold' to seven teachers of the year with the mere promise of entering their names into a drawing for an iPOD. (That's thing #1.) Thing #2: The email tries an analogy to current online marketplaces: TEACHERSpayTEACHERS.com will function, as he writes, "Sort of like ebay for teachers/professors and teacher-created materials." The analogy, of course, is already false because ebay is an auction. What, I'm going to bid on Stanley Fish's latest interpretive communities syllabus without looking at it? Or trying it? I couldn't afford it. Nor could I afford it if there were a set price of any kind. Thing #3: Edelman also tries out (obviously ebay-inspired) entrepreneurial language: "essentially you will be starting your own small businesses." Thing #4: the whole things smacks of the corporatized "best practices" approach, which has always, as now, set me on edge.

It might be tempting to compare such a marketplace to someone getting paid to visit a campus and conduct workshops like Moore Howard does from time to time. But such a comparison would be flawed: when Becky or anyone else visits a school to conduct workshops on plagiarism, or to talk about (as I have) incorporating newspapers into a composition course, we don't charge a door fee or set up a tip jar in the room for individual instructors to pay us for our ideas; instead, if any money is exchanged at all, the institution or department pays a modest honorarium, because the institution or department would like to facilitate an exchange of ideas, a communal sharing of practices.

Besides, if I were to 'sell' the notion of using a newspaper in my class, I'd need to pay Marie Secor at Penn State who first gave me the idea, as well as The New York Times, which once invited me to a focus group on teaching with the Times (the fifty bucks and free pizza is of course evidence that teaching is never entirely separate from commercial activity), any syllabi I consulted while cruising the web for readings and whatnot, my grad school pals and undergraduate students who tried this out along with me and with whom I refined the technique, senior colleagues who have evaluated my teaching and discussed any approach with me, and my textbook co-author Sharon Crowley, with whom I've written about such practices. In other words, the approach, or any syllabus I might develop, is not mine to sell.

In still other words: teaching practices are communally developed, communally shared, and if any money is involved, it comes from institutions (grants, honoraria, royalties, etc.) That's because teaching is a live practice with so many elements (techniques, activities, and syllabus components) culled from so many 'sources.' I understand that such ideas, practices, and yes, even artifacts are frequently shared with other teachers and professors in the form of textbooks, but when was the last time any of us who teach paid for a textbook? (I know, I know, I'll save the rant about how the textbook industry exploits students and authors for another time.)

Okay, I'll stop there, knowing that I probably should have left it where RMH did, and reached for my fan.

 

Comments

[Z]

what do you think about "distance learning"? On the one hand, it seems horrible for all the reasons enumerated here. On the other hand, it could potentially give people access to education that they might otherwise not have the means to get. The Odyssey project that John is setting up is clearly a preferable way to achieve this goal, but are there any benefits to distance learning or is it just another corporate scam?

(I like this blog.)

[JM]

This reminds me of an idea I had a while back, which is called TEACHERSbuyTEACHERS.com. It's pretty much what it sounds like: if you don't feel like teaching on a given day, you can buy an un- or under-employed adjunct or graduate student to teach your class. It costs slightly more than buying teachers' classroom practices, but, you know, not that much more.

[dhawhee]

Z, are you saying I can win an iPOD for teaching a distance learning class?? And I bet I can even listen to it while teaching. Awesome! Seriously, though, I see some differences between what's going on here and the world campuses that are emerging through distance education, as in, I imagine it still takes innovative strategies and materials to run an online course well. There are tons of folks in my field who know more about DE than I do--for example, some have even taught distance ed courses. So maybe they'll run the comparison for us.

JM: now THAT's an idea. Maybe Edelman should put that in his pipe and smoke it. It also occurs to me that Elizabeth could have used this service you imagine when she was scheduling all her campus visits.

[Z]

JM,
When our dept was discussing hiring someone with an endowed chair, and salary figures were being thrown around in our meeting, one of our senior professors commented, "With that, you could just hire your own assistant professor." Said as a joke, but then again.....

[dhawhee]

heh. I remember that comment. That was funny.

[senioritis]

Your reading of the email is spot on, D. You and I are both textbook writers, and we both know how much of ourselves actually does go into textbooks. Yet for me there's something obscene and bottom-feeding about the notion that this guy is going to gather together all our teaching materials (which, as you say, are so much indebted to our colleagues, in mostly untraceable ways), market them, and take a 15% piece of that pie. Teaching materials are part of the commons.

[Paul Edelman]

Hi,

Paul Edelman here. I came across this blog entry today and I figured I'd enter the mix. You guys are right about the eBay metaphor. Most of my uses of it did include the parenthetical statement (without the auctions), but I guess I left it out of that email. The point was more that my site will be an open marketplace like eBay where people, in this case, teachers, can open up shop and try to sell their stuff.

Yeah, I agree that copyright issues are tricky with regard to educational materials. I hired a couple of terrific educational copyright lawyers who are fellows at Stanford to help sort out the issues. Basically, ideas aren't copyrightable but expression is. So if you take some ideas from colleagues and a methodology from a school of thought and a little bit of this from there and some of that from a different place, like most teachers do, and you create a unique stew, you can copyright it and sell it.

I loved sharing with my colleagues and I do believe that in a perfect world, teachers shouldn't have to pay for teaching materials. But if that were the case, the educational publishing companies (who by the way, create copyrightable stews like the rest of us) wouldn't put money and effort into their publications. The free capitalist market is an important factor in the raising of quality! And what I've come to notice about all of the free materials available online is that it all must be just a fraction of what has actually been created by teachers over the years. Why doesn't every teacher take the time to post his or her teaching materials for everyone to share? I wish they did, but they don't.

I think that my site will provide an incentive to do so that teacher-authors will respond to.

What do you think?

Sincere regards,

Paul

[Paul Edelman]

correction... i meant analogy not metaphor. my bad.

[dhawhee]

I'm on my way to an appointment, so I need to keep this first response short: I won't ever pay someone for their teaching materials. I also see what you mean about stews, but copyrightable stews? Hmm. Besides, those stews are generally offered to teachers at no cost. Having just returned from the Conference on College Composition and Communication with some nifty new pedagogical ideas with no price tag, I believe the economy of teaching materials and techniques is very different from what TeachersPayTeachers seems to assume. I have never and will not pay out of my own pocket for teaching materials, no matter how spectacular. And I'd be shocked if any of my colleagues thought this was a good idea.