Veteran teacher Nancy Flanagan recently asked where are the men in education? She comes to this question with notable credentials: 31 years as K-12 teacher; a Teacher in Residence with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, 1993 Michigan Teacher of the Year, and a Danforth Teacher Leadership Fellow among other accomplishments.
… men are a diminishing force in teaching, a distinct cause for alarm when you consider that half the pool of prospective teachers is men … We are rapidly approaching a 20/80 split in male/female teachers …
Her question prompted, in the spirit of comity, two questions for me and I think for many in industry: “What do you mean by the word ‘teacher’?” and “So what. Why would anyone want to teach?”
I come to these questions while living most of my life among educators. At one point maybe five years ago, I calculated for a granddaughter that our family had accumulated over 425 years since 1927 of classroom teaching, school administration, and academic scholarship. One relative conducted classes that drew about 500 students a year for most of her 50 years of teaching. Another added up over 50 years of classroom service in public and private schools. Some of us are second generation educators in our birth families. Many of us taught students in locations where most teachers will not even drive through intentionally, and if they did, would not understand the local language spoken. In addition, many of us as children were raised among extended families that taught by example in domestic, religious, and work settings. We knew classroom teachers as family members, neighbors, the person next to us in church, and part of our daily lives in many other ways.
“Yes,” most of these teachers were and are women. And “No,” not everyone in our family likes or even respects schools or teachers beyond sometimes having to tolerate each. Also, many of the “No” relatives work in and around education as businesses and a social institution, because they respect glimpses of disciplined thought and skill they find in education away from classrooms and their inhabitants.
The idea today of who is a teacher in our family, and I think in industry also, became murky.
Advanced technologies such as Tablet PCs, Ultra-Mobile PCs, and other mobile PCs provide us with access anytime from almost any place to learn whatever we want at the moment from someone we may not have met in any other way or place. Many of us use these tools or their grandparent – desktops – almost every day to find information about something relevant to a decision we will make.
I think of these people who provide such tidbits of information or insights as “teachers.” They include education software and hardware developers, publishing editors, automobile technical bulletin authors, do it yourself demonstrators, et al. They each make a living providing ways to do something those who want to know something can use. They stimulate my curiosity, and I hope yours too.
Where are the men in teaching? I see more men in these new forms of teaching than women. I don’t know specifically why it is so, but the balance probably is less than 20/80 women to men in electronic based teaching in non-school venues.
Nancy’s question seems relevant. I’m glad someone who thinks as she seems to think is concerned with question.
Yet, it also appears that these new education leaders outside of schools are creating more openings for more people to learn more than schools can conceivably offer without accepting new definitions of what it means “to teach.”
I hope that these two aggregates of teachers will try harder to find ways to work together, sooner than later, for the sake of the rising generation of learners in and out of schools. I plan to continue trying to assist in bringing together people interested in the teaching – learning equation.