I am a man who has spent much of his career teaching in elementary school settings. I taught kindergarten for the first eight or nine years of my career, then spent another nine or 10 years teaching first and second grades.
At first I was the only male classroom teacher in the lower school (this was a small independent school, pre-K through 12th grade), though there was an occasional specialist teacher who was male—One year, for example, the kids had a man as a music teacher. When I moved on to first grade, the school replaced me at the kindergarten with another man, and a couple years later they hired a man to teach pre-kindergarten as well. Three men obviously wasn’t a tremendous total, but three men at the very lowest grades in a fairly small school was, I think, pretty good.
Why aren’t there more? I think there are a bunch of reasons, but the one I’d highlight is cultural, what I sometimes call the “tyranny of expectations.” By this I mean that many people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that a man might teach elementary grades, especially pre-kindergarten and primary school. I often felt like a curiosity, especially in the first 10 or 15 years.
And while few people were openly negative about my career choice, I certainly got a number of comments that seemed designed to deflect me into some other profession entirely, or at the very least into a different grade level… Perhaps one more fitting for a man.
My mother the staunch feminist, for example, knew that I liked working with children and knew that I was very good with children, but she was strongly against the idea that I might actually go into teaching. My sister did not exhibit any particular interest in teaching, but it is hard for me to imagine that my mother would’ve responded the same way if my sister had decided to go teach kindergarten.
Another example: my first boss, the elementary school principal, always said that she thought I did very good work with the kids, but kept suggesting that perhaps I ought to go and teach history to the older students in the middle and high school. To some degree I believe this was meant as a compliment; she didn’t think much of the teaching abilities of some of the people who taught classes at those levels. But I couldn’t help feeling that she was trying to push me into something else, something that I really didn’t have much interest in, and since she didn’t seem to be doing this to any of my female colleagues, it was a little hard to escape the notion that she wasn’t quite comfortable with a man teaching five-year-olds.In her world, men didn’t do that sort of thing, and it was a little difficult for her to make sense of a man who did, and seemed happy with that choice.
I don’t mean to imply that nobody was supportive; many people were. But we carry images around in our heads, and act according to the images more often than we would like, and let’s face it, few people visualize a six foot three inch man when they hear the words “kindergarten teacher.” Cognitive dissonance can be uncomfortable, and one way to get rid of it is to send the teacher in question to some profession more up his alley.