MenTeach E-News
September 2016
1) What It’s Like Being A Male Teacher
2) NZ Police heads towards gender balance while the Ministry of Education holds on to sex-role stereotypes for early childhood education
3) Recent college graduate returns to classroom: Town welcomes fourth-grade teacher
4) UPDATED: Register Now! Northern California Men in Child Care Conference
5) Video: Male Teachers in Mississippi
6) Will More Black Male Teachers Help Black Boys Better Succeed In School?
7) Free teacher-training program for men labeled gender discrimination
8) Why we need more male teachers and more female principals
9) Education facing shortage of African American male teachers
10) Editorial: My father was a teacher
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1) What It’s Like Being A Male Teacher
I work in a field dominated by women.
I’m a teacher.
As a man in that job, I’ve been talked down to, talked over, patronized, condescended, corrected, and otherwise ignored most often by female teachers – I’ve been womansplained.
And I’m not alone. Many of my male colleagues have reported a similar phenomenon. They’ll be in a meeting with other teachers, sharing an idea, when a female teacher will interrupt them and dismiss what they’re saying with a curt explanation. The mostly-female group will then move on, having forgotten the male teacher’s words.
But, let’s pause for a moment and take a look at a few facts:
Teaching has historically been a field open to women. While more lucrative and respected professions had been closed off by systemic sexism for years, teaching has long been considered a castoff appropriate for women.
Whereas the majority of teachers are female, the majority of administrators are male. Though many reasons might explain this discrepancy, it’s hard to imagine that education is free from the glass ceiling women encounter in other professions.
While we’ve made many strides toward reaching equality between the sexes in society, many damaging stereotypes still exist for women, and we’ve still got a long way to go – sexism in all areas of American life persists. Big time.
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2) NZ Police heads towards gender balance while the Ministry of Education holds on to sex-role stereotypes for early childhood education
New Zealand Police attempts to recruit more women have been successful and rewarded.
In 2012 just 24 per cent of new police recruits across the country were women, but last year that number jumped to nearly 36 per cent thanks to new programmes targeted specifically at females.
For police to have the trust and confidence of the community they must be representative of the people they serve, they believe.
“It’s no simple task to change the culture of a large organisation, especially when you’re dealing with an issue that has been impacting the workforce for a long period of time,” said Diversity Works NZ chief executive Bev Cassidy-Mackenzie (NZ newswire story)
Meanwhile Early Childhood Education remains one of the last bastions of occupational sexism as the Government and Ministry of Education sit on their hands and deny the importance of gender balance and the benefits this would bring for children, women and NZ society. Early childhood teaching is a ‘pink’ profession with 98% of the workforce being female and only 2% male.
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3) Recent college graduate returns to classroom: Town welcomes fourth-grade teacher
From college football player and aspiring coach to fourth-grade teacher. That’s how Adam Langan ended up in Nisswa.
“I kind of lost interest in football the second year I was playing and really gained more interest in teaching,” Langan said. “(I) realized that teaching was really what I wanted to do.”
A 2016 graduate of Bemidji State University, the Thief River Falls native grew up with teaching in his blood.
“Both my grandparents were teachers,” Langan said. “I remember growing up and talking to them about teaching and how they really enjoyed teaching for many years … All the conversations kind of revolved around teaching, so I really saw myself being a teacher right away.”
The family ties aren’t the only reasons Langan chose this career path.
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4) UPDATED: Register Now! Northern California Men in Child Care Conference
Northern California Men in Child Care Conference
October 22, 2016
8AM – 4:30PM
American River College
Sacramento, CA
AEYC members, Los Rios College District Students, and
Sierra College Students…………………………. $44.00
Non-members, Non-Students…………………. $70.00
Download the registration information.
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5) Video: Male Teachers in Mississippi
Across the country, teaching is considered an overwhelmingly female profession.
According to menteach.org in the Mississippi School Systems, grades k-12, only seventeen percent of teachers are made up of males.
The marines may be looking for a few good men but Mississippi School Systems are in the same position.
For many students in grade school a teacher is usually a Mrs. and if there are men in the school system they work as a bus driver, coach a sport or do vocational work.
To be a teacher, one must have a love for the class room.
“This is my 49th year as a teacher and I decided very early in my life that I wanted to be a teacher and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. You have to have a dedication to the young people,” New Hope Science Teacher Ricky Jones said.
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6) Will More Black Male Teachers Help Black Boys Better Succeed In School?
Educator Christopher Emdin has unhappy memories of being a young black student taught by a black male teacher who didn’t see value in him as a person. Now, he sees his experiences persists among students he’s interviewed and worked with.
An associate professor at Teachers College Columbia University, Emdin’s ideas and experiences differ from a belief expressed by former United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and echoed by Duncan’s successor John King Jr. — more black teachers and role models in the classroom will help young black boys succeed at school.
“Just recruiting black men alone will not solve our problem,” said Emdin, author of “For White Folk Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education.”
Despite the fact only 2 percent of the nation’s teachers are black men, Emdin disputes the theory recruiting black male teachers will make good students out of young boys of color.
Read the article: /node/2975
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7) Free teacher-training program for men labeled gender discrimination
A new teacher-training program has been created for men in Fujian province, Beijing News reported on Sept. 26.
The project was initiated last year by the Fujian Provincial Education Department, together with three other local departments and five teacher training universities. The purpose of the program is to ease the serious gender imbalance among primary school and kindergarten teachers.
The project continues this year, with 500 male participants receiving free training. Wang Yimei (a pseudonym), a female student at a teachers’ college, believes that the project itself is a kind of gender discrimination. She sent an application to the provincial legislative affairs office for a legal review of the policy on Sept. 22, but has not yet received a reply.
An education major at Fujian Normal University said that although the project may succeed in changing the current proportion of male to female teachers in schools, the men-only policy is nevertheless unfair to women. Read the article: /node/2979
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8) Why we need more male teachers and more female principals
Classrooms are a microcosm of society. In our schools, children learn the stories they will tell themselves for the rest of their lives, stories formed from the material they have around them.
What will today’s primary children tell themselves about gender?
Men have been steadily disappearing from Irish classrooms since the 1970s. In 1961, nearly 40pc of primary teachers were male. Today it is below 15pc.
What message does that send to our children? Will they learn that the primary classroom is no place for young men?
It’s a problem that has so far defied solutions, although efforts have been made to encourage men into the classroom. A 2006 report, ‘Males into Primary Teaching’ looked at the reasons why men are not becoming primary teachers. Among the reasons put forward were the stereotyping of primary teaching as a feminine role, the long pay scale, limited opportunities for promotion, and poor Irish results by boys in the Leaving Certificate. Read the article: /node/2980
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9) Education facing shortage of African American male teachers
Rodney McCloud is something of a rarity in the education profession. He’s an African American male educator who teaches a STEM-related class.
McCloud teaches drafting at Carroll High School and is one of just a few African American male teachers in the system and the state. Nationwide, just two percent of all public school teachers are African American males, although 15 percent of public school students are African Americans.
McCloud said that getting more African American men in the classroom is essential to the development of many students.
“A number of kids come from homes without a male figure in them at all,” he said. “I’d guess to say the number of those that have a personal relationship with a black male is even smaller. Young black men especially need positive role models more than anyone. Again, outside of coaches and possibly a pastor, they probably don’t have a positive role model. They need someone they can get to know and learn from as opposed to idolizing an artist or athlete.”
Dothan City School Superintendent Chuck Ledbetter said school systems often struggle to recruit male educators, especially African American males. Ledbetter said school systems outside urban centers have a particularly tough time. Read the article: /node/2983
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10) Editorial: My father was a teacher
or a little over a decade, my life has been dedicated to the growth and success of students of all ages – university students, high/middle school students, and for the last eight years, elementary students.
Through my adolescent and young adulthood years I had to grapple with the dreaded question from family, friends, and respected mentors: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” As I grew I had many professions come and go from that ‘short list’ of prospective future careers: doctor, lawyer, physical therapist, business owner, finance, engineer — but the mainstay was always education.
Every person with whom I had this conversation would applaud all of these career paths, with the exception of education. When I had conversations with others about education, I invariably heard a list of reasons I should not follow that career path: long hours, lack of pay, misbehavior of students, parents, administrators, school boards… Despite consistently hearing these these warnings, my decision to pursue a career in education was ultimately motivated by my observations of a great teacher, mentor, and role model — my father. Read the editorial: /node/2978
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