Going for the Extra Credit

Deanna Jump, a kindergarten teacher in Warner Robins, Ga., recently became a millionaire. She didn’t inherit a fortune or win the lottery. She earned the money by selling lesson plans to other teachers. Jump is one of about 15,000 teachers marketing their original classroom materials through the website TeachersPayTeachers (TPT). Since signing on to the site in September 2008, she’s created 99 separate teaching units, priced at about $8 a pop. They “usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,” says Jump, whose monthly earnings through the site now exceed $100,000. “If you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need, from language, art, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources.”

While no one else on TPT has been as successful as Jump, at least three other teachers have earned $300,000, and 26 have earned more than $100,000, according to the site’s founder, Paul Edelman. “Of the 15,000 teachers who are contributing, about 10,000 make money in any given quarter,” he says.