A Lesson Earned

By Aaron Dalton

There’s a venerable legend about inventing the high-tech world’s Next Big Thing: All you need is to do is disappear into your garage with a computer and a really terrific idea, and what you come out with may change the world. Scaled down to the teaching world, and allowing for a few variations in time and place—it’s not the late 1970s, and New York City has few garages of the type Microsoft founder Bill Gates or Apple co-creator Steve Jobs did their fiddling in—that’s what former teacher Paul Edelman has in mind with teacherspayteachers.com .

Sitting in front of two computer screens in the one-bedroom Manhattan apartment that doubles as world headquarters for the site and its parent company, Teacher Synergy Inc., Edelman doesn’t look much like a high-tech pioneer. The trim, clean-cut 33-year-old lacks the almost requisite mussed hair and questionable clothing choices of an iconic computer genius. But then, he’s not really an inventor of the classic stripe. Fundamentally, all he’s really doing is using the Internet to bring experienced educators’ battle-tested classroom materials to other teachers willing to pay for them.

“Why reinvent the wheel every night?” Edelman says of the lesson-plan preparation ritual many teachers go through. “Why waste your time when great ideas...