Teacher Comp (time)
Maybe you’ve heard it from friends who work in other industries. They need to stay late one night at work and their boss says to log that time as comp time. Spend an extra hour here today, leave an extra hour early another day.
If only that worked for teachers.
This website was created based on two things: the realization that tracking information down was often the most time-consuming part of lesson planning and the irritation of finding a link to just the right resources only to learn it’s blocked by a paywall.
At Teacher Comp, we’ve done all of the tracking down for you and we’re not going to give you links to other websites that ask you to take out your wallet. If we have or find resources that need to be purchased to use, we’ll tell you up front.
Each page will give you some basic information about the text, connections to the IB Literature and IB Language & Literature Areas of Exploration and Conceptual Understandings, and links to other websites with resources for teaching that text.
Most pages are broken into the following categories:
Full text, basic summaries, and overviews: a good place to start if you haven’t taught the text before, or if you’re looking for resources to give students. We try to only link resources that are fully available without a paywall. If there’s a paywall involved, we’ve linked it because it provides a lot of good content for free before the paywall kicks in.
About the author: videos, biographies, interviews, and anything else we can find to help students (and their teachers) understand who the author is, what their writing process is like, and the context in which their text was written.
Articles, essays, and videos about the text: this section is often a hodgepodge—academic essays about the text, news articles about the text and/or its reception, videos on topics that are relevant to the text, and more. We aim to choose resources that you can share directly with students. If something is too long or academic for a middle- or high-school audience, we’ll include a note about the pages that are most relevant for teachers and students.
Lesson plans and other teaching resources: If there’s a lesson plan on the Internet that’s free and ready to be used by teachers, we’ve linked it. This section’s links should be ready to go without your needing to do a lot of extra work beyond reading the lesson plan and printing handouts. If it’s not ready to use, we’ll probably post it in the “articles, essays, and videos” topic. Teachers Pay Teachers lesson plans are occasionally posted here, but only if they’re free.
We may eventually have lesson plans and other resources available for purchase. If you’re looking for something in particular—or if you’d like to suggest a new text to add to this website—please don’t hesitate to reach out. Contact information is at the bottom of this page.
This website is growing and changing daily; if you want to be notified when we add new resources, make sure to sign up for our newsletter below.