MenTeach E-News
April 2015
1) Proud to have a young man to be the child care centre’s manager in Malaysia
2) Recruiting Male Teachers
3) I’m so glad we hired a male au pair
4) Male teachers in Quebec schools
5) Brief letter about teaching for 17 years
6) On Sale: Men Who Teach Young Children – An international perspective
7) Call to attract more men to teaching in New Zealand
8) Nonprofit trains students to stay in school, become teachers
9) New scheme launched to get more men into childcare jobs in United Kingdom
10) Black male teachers: There aren’t enough of them
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1) Proud to have a young man to be the child care centre’s manager in Malaysia
Management of our centre during this year 2015 has made a tremendous change in the organisational hierarchy. We were surprised and were not very keen and happy to have a male boss at first.
As days passed and now after three consecutive months we have changed our perception. He is so nice and concerned about our welfare. He is an open-minded person and ever willing to hear our comments and concerns over certain issues.
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2) Recruiting Male Teachers
Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS) district is on a special assignment. The district wants to have at least 22 percent of its new teachers this year to be male. Currently out of about 9,000 CMS teachers, 20 percent are male.
The national average is about 24 percent of teachers are men. CMS superintendent Ann Clark believes increasing male teachers will make a difference in learning and help fill the teacher pipeline.
“That is a way,” Clark said. “You begin to show kids that this is a viable profession, otherwise kids don’t see that message day in and day out.”
CMS also wants to increase the number of male teachers.
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3) I’m so glad we hired a male au pair
My husband recently moved abroad with work, returning on average for a week every month. We joke that he’s a tourist in the family, but it’s not always funny. I ploughed through the first few months juggling being a full-time mum to our two sons – school runs, play dates and winter viruses – and launching a magazine, before I collapsed into my gin one Friday night (OK, a Wednesday afternoon) and touted the idea of getting an au pair.
Being a graduate of the Old School, my other half, Dave, automatically assumed that I was proposing a sassy young girl should enter the family fold, the very thought of which moved him to start clearing the spare room cupboard. Naturally, I didn’t set him straight.
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4) Male teachers in Quebec schools
Statistics from Quebec’s education ministry show there are fewer male teachers than ever in our schools.
The numbers obtained by the Journal de Montreal show close to 2000 men have left teaching over the past five years.
Overall males represent 21.6 per cent of teachers in schools, five years ago it was 23.3 per cent.
In high schools the portion of male teachers is slightly higher, 36 per cent.
In elementary school, it’s 15 per cent, and in kindergarten it’s 2 per cent.
“I’m not surprised at all, but I’m disturbed by these numbers because it’s hugely important that there’s a gender balance in the teaching profession, the number of students that come from single parent families is growing every year so I think it’s important to have role models of both genders is schools,” Robert Green, a teacher at Westmount High School said.
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5) Brief letter about teaching for 17 years
I first discovered MenTeach while researching men in early childhood for an online ECE class I was taking. While scouring the internet for information, I came across an article entitled “Myths About Men Who Work with Young Children.” It became a part of a larger research project, and that project led me to finding MenTeach. It has been my great pleasure over the past seventeen years to work with children ranging from infancy to high school.
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6) On Sale: Men Who Teach Young Children – An international perspective
[MenTeach: Special offer through Stylus Publishing. This offer is valid until 15 May 2015.] Few men around the world work in daycare settings, nursery schools or kindergartens. Yet wherever they are found, men who are perceived to have crossed the gender boundary in their choice of profession are widely acclaimed as gifted educators and excellent caregivers. Policy makers who care about providing quality education for young children need to understand what attracts men to work with young children and how to retain them in the workforce so they can make the most of this underutilized human resource in early childhood education.
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7) Call to attract more men to teaching in New Zealand
The number of male teachers has increased in Tauranga and is almost 5 per cent higher than the national average.
However, one school principal is concerned the figures will drop as baby boomers retire.
Figures from the Ministry of Education show in 2014 there were 485 male teachers employed at state or state integrated schools compared to 463 in 2012.
Nationally, as at April 2014, 15,399 (26.2 per cent) teachers were male and 43,308 (73.8 per cent) were female – with 30.9 per cent of teachers in Tauranga registered as male.
8) Nonprofit trains students to stay in school, become teachers
In her 20 years as CEO of Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Teachers, Bettye H. Perkins has seen hundreds of ninth-graders return to their schools as teachers after completing the nonprofit’s mentorship and training program.
The mission of the White Plains-based nonprofit is to fill the diversity gap in the teaching profession by training culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged students from ninth grade through college to become teachers. Schools of all sizes are becoming increasingly diverse, yet nationally, 13 percent of teachers are of color, Perkins said.
“We have a lot of work to do to try to find role models to match our growing diverse student population,” Perkins said.
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9) New scheme launched to get more men into childcare jobs in United Kingdom
A new scheme has been set up to help encourage more men to enter the childcare profession in Lancashire.
The Lancashire Men in Childcare Network has been established by Andrew Clifford, managing director of the First Class Childcare Group, which has bases in Barrow, Whalley, Accrington and Clayton-le-Moors.
The group will hold it’s first meeting tomorrow at the Dunkenhalgh Hotel in Clayton-le-Moors from 1.30pm to 4pm.
It hopes to build links with council early years teams, local training providers, secondary schools, careers advisers and further education colleges in the region.
The network is also planning to work alongside other emerging groups in London, Southampton and York.
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10) Black male teachers: There aren’t enough of them
Consider these statistics: Slightly more than half of all public schools students are children of color. Yet, despite documented benefits of a racially and ethnically diverse teaching force, no more than 2 percent of teachers in the public education system are black men. What’s more, research shows that teachers of color are leaving the profession. The following post discusses the reasons for the dearth of black males in the teaching force and how to support and retain them. It was written by Travis J. Bristol, a research and policy fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) who used to teach high school English teacher in New York City public schools and who was a teacher educator with the Boston Teacher Residency program.
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