It’s very important that there are more men in teaching. Klara’s two main teachers in camp are young men, and it’s a completely different energy than that of women teachers. Different games, different ways of relating to each other. A lot of ribbing, a lot of daring. It’s great even for girls to have this kind of teaching. For boys, it is indispensable.
10 responses to “Male Teachers”
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We need more male energy everywhere. The stupid prattle about “toxic masculinity” has done so much damage we’ll be repairing it for a century.
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I would love to see more male teachers in the lower grades, the kids love them and they have different ways of relating to the kids that boys respond to very well. Unfortunately a lot of people think that if a guy wants to work with little kids, he could be a pedophile or just gay, that working with kids is weird for a guy. I have a male friend who’s a kindergarten teacher and he gets that a lot, they wonder why a straight guy would want to work with children and if he’s secretly a pedophile since they assume no normal guy wants to be around young kids
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Perhaps the stereotype is there for a reason. My child had a male teacher in daycare that completely creeped me out and contributed to me moving them to a different daycare. The said teacher looked effeminate- long hair, scarves, long red nails. Normally I don’t care how people dress, but you bet I will judge you when you are spending a lot of time with my child. On top of that, lgbtq/blm friendly books started to appear in the classroom (we are talking about 3 year old children). I brought it up to the director who actually agreed with me the books were developmentally inappropriate. Male teachers – no problem. Effeminate male teachers with questionable agenda – you will not be around my child for long.
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I agree completely. Thankfully, our school is a Christian school and everybody is eminently normal. In the situation you describe, I’d definitely be against the whole setup.
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I can imagine that behavior problems were fewer in classrooms led by men… but that’s strictly theoretical for me. At no point after seventh grade did I have to attend public school. When it’s homeschool co-ops and little church schools, you don’t have ritalin and behavior problems: they un-invite those kids, and there’s a waitlist to fill their spots.
Still: the classes taught by the church choir director, the assistant pastor, that one retired engineer, and the church/school accountant– all men– really stood out from the rest. Just better. Everybody paid more attention, there was less busywork, and IMO we learned more. The one exception, alas, was our Spanish class. That dude was a flake and nobody liked him. The Sra. we got the next year was way better.
It’s still not totally clear to me whether those classes were better because they were taught by *men* or better because they were taught by people whose primary vocation was not *teacher*– who had a lot of expertise outside the classroom, and whose competency qualified them for much better jobs.
I think it’d be a worthwhile experiment to try a school/teaching model where the role of teacher is primarily filled by people who are currently in, or retired from, successful work in other fields– teaching as a duty to the community rather than a primary profession.
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It’s really great for the kids at Klara school to be in daily contact with these young male teachers who are religious, who go to church, who want to get married and have kids. They perceive these young men as incredibly cool, and when one of them says that he’s planning to propose to his girlfriend and they aren’t living together because they are Christian and believe in marriage, that has more of an impact than a thousand lectures from middle-aged female teachers could. And I say it as a middle-aged female teacher.
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For real. I avoid giving such advice for exactly that reason: I’m definitely not cool enough to make it sound good. We need more spokesmodels 😉
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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