We have a lot fewer of them than when I was a child, and this (assumption that they’re some sort of predator) is always cited to me as the primary reason.
On teacher pay, teachers within a district are paid the same scale regardless if they teach high school calculus or the second grade. Elementary or high school its the same starting pay and pay steps based on educational level and years of service.
The only difference in pay is that more high school teachers coach sports which lead to extra pay while those in elementary rarely coach.
Thank you for responding.
I’d like to ask, did your presence with the other teachers, either in the teachers lounge or at official meetings, seem to change things when before it was all female?
Also finally, did parents ever try to either steer kids away or towards your class depending upon whether they wanted or did NOT want their kids to have a male teacher?
I guess he installed cameras before working there.
Yes, I know. It was a combination of both low prestige AND low pay. There’s more prestige (not tons, but more) in teaching high school history than in teaching 1st grade.
Found an article from the Association of American Educators that says the same basic thing:
If I can answer from my own experience, things changed dramatically. As far as I can tell, before I showed up there were no teacher meetings at my school, nor did a teacher lounge exist. The first I heard of any teacher meetings happening in my district was, coincidentally enough, the first one I went to.
Edit: now that you’ve got me thinking about it, this has been true for every job I’ve ever worked at. I’m starting to get creeped out.
I’m an English teacher, and work mostly with kindergarten students and lower elementary students, although I have some middle school, high school and adult students.
All of the Taiwanese kindergarten teachers are females, although some of the Taiwanese English teachers are male. Among foreign English teachers, there are probably more males than females for kindergarten and lower elementary school as there seems to be higher number of men than woman who go abroad to teach English.
I don’t know if it really matters the gender of the teacher as much as their effectiveness in dealing with students. I have seen effective and ineffective teachers of both genders.
In 1978 I was about to graduate from “teachers’ college”. My major professor (Educational Philosophy) asked if he could forward my record, resume, etc., to Columbia Teachers’ College, hoping for a full scholarship, because New York City was dying to get males from the South to teach there at any grade level.
I thanked him, most kindly I hope, but OH HELL NO! We had then, and have now, our own kind of special stupid in the South. “All the gold in California”, you know…
If they want to teach the primary grades and are good at it, of course!
Conversely, people are skeptical when I tell them that my elementary and junior high principals (these years spanned the 1970s) were always women, and older women at that - not the 30-something that principals seem to be nowadays.
And yet somehow we can find six hundred billion for military spending every year. How about we just spend five hundred and ninety billion of military spending and give every teacher in the country a ten percent raise?
When did your teacher claim these changes occurred? Because, my understanding is that teaching has *always *been both low paying and predominantly female.
And, for much of that time dominated by women who were not the “secondary income”, as women were expected to quit when they got married and certainly before they had children.
“Women are to blame for teachers making low pay” really doesn’t pass the sniff test.
One might be tempted to say that elementary teachers tend to be nurturers, and women also tend to be nurturers, so it would make sense that women would be more likely to choose to be elementary teachers.
not PC to think there might be differences between men and women, I know.
When I taught 4th grade, there were a number of male teachers in school–one classroom teacher next door, and many specials teachers. Some of the girls in my class who did not have a father at home were drawn to the male teachers in school. Provided that background checks were rigorous and thorough, and there was careful supervision, it was a good thing for there to be men in the school.
I didn’t notice the boys being strongly influenced by men in the building, but boys in school aren’t encouraged to be boyish by anyone.
My son had a male first grade teacher. There is a shortage of men who want to do the job for various reason (not unlike the shortage of women and minorities in other professions).
It was nice, but his teacher was a really good teacher. And that wasn’t about being a man. Although I do agree with young boys having more positive male role models in their lives - and school being a place to find them. However, you are going to have to fix the pipeline and create more male elementary school teachers - and given how we currently treat teachers, I wouldn’t wish that career on my worst enemy.
I can see a strong possibility of quality of teachers being sacrificed for superficial things.
My brother had a horrible male teacher in 2nd grade. The man imposed his beliefs on the class, made worse by the fact that his values were 180 degrees from the values of the community. His lessons were developmentally inappropriate, and he had temper tantrums in front of the class. He didn’t “believe in sugar” and threw scissors at a student whose mother had packed an apple for lunch. That was the last straw, and he was fired, but not before doing a lot of damage.
Yes, we need more male elementary school (and even early childhood) teachers!
My (male) cousin is an elementary school teacher, who prefers to teach the younger grades (kindergarten to 2nd). When he student taught a first grade class, the students called him Miss Lastname instead of Mr. Lastname. They had never had a male teacher in preschool or kindergarten and thought all teachers were either Miss or Mrs.
Especially in areas where there is a lack of good male role models for young children, we need good men to be there for young kids, modeling good behavior and values.
One of my son’s pre-K teachers was a man. All the kids loved him. As far as I could tell he was the only male teacher/admin/etc at the preschool. He was only there for a semester, but the impact he had on the kids was considerable. I think it was because it was such a novelty to them. Most of the kids at the preschool had two working parents and had been in daycare/preschool their whole lives with only women caregivers/teachers.
He did not have another male teacher until middle school.
I would love to see greater gender diversity at the elementary and preschool levels.
I get this many times a school year. I don’t particularly mind, so some kids might do it for the taboo thrill, but others just get confused. I’ve also been called “Mama” more than once :).