The worst thing about teachers' crap pay is how it impacts men

[noblegiraffe]

Is the message I'm getting from this Times article
https://www.thetimes.com/article/6d47f549-bc16-42f5-87eb-1a742ca8dbb0?shareToken=632bef4c3b70c58fa6f1720e42fc2d68

Teacher pay is crap, which means that men are leaving teaching, which means that boys aren't seeing enough positive male role models in schools.

Fine for women to limp along on shitty pay for years though?

The real problem here is the belief that boys can only learn from men what it is to be a decent human being.

Obviously women are useless role models and not worthy of any respect.

So let's pay men more than women to get them back into the classroom, and let the cycle of patriarchy continue whereby boys are taught from day zero that women are worth less than them, and have nothing to offer other than sex and babies.

It's bad enough that the curriculum makes women and their achievements invisible - I read a statistic last year that only 2% of students study a book by a female author. Now we're suggesting that we need to make female teachers invisible in schools too, because without men around, who on earth will those boys be able to look up to?!

FFS!!!

This seems like a pretty good article to me. It's of course focussing on boys - who generally perform worse in school - and men - who are underrepresented in teaching. But that's fair enough!

They are two unconnected sentences, historically at least 40 years apart. Any good editor should have taken a red pen to that paragraph and questioned what the first sentence was even doing there. People do read things differently but even my DH (hooray! A male teacher!) agreed with me on that paragraph being odd. In fact, he pointed it out.

I think we create a big problem in schools if we suggest to boys that the best teachers for them are men and the only possible role models and people to look up to have to be the same sex as them. It's already the case that men lead schools and women do the middle grafting roles , the admin and the pastoral work.

When i was younger i hated schools and teachers.
Now im older i dont hate any they are just not important to me.

They aren’t disconnected

prior to 1944 there were many more men in the profession than women and married women could be disbarred

now however…. The demographic is vastly different

and then the article goes on to explore the why

True, because they are all headteachers....

Sex is real and socially salient. If boys notice there are no men interested in studying and learning, they are likely to conclude that those activities are not for them. This is not because of a hierarchy in the way you suggest. It would (and does) apply equally to girls seeing a lack of women as politicians, doctors, scientists, lawyers, etc. - as was the case until fairly recently.

Would you have suggested to those girls that they should simply aspire to be like the men who had those roles?

Exactly

we know there’s a problem
and so this article considers one reason that may contribute

By missing out 50 years? Teaching was a female dominated profession before 1944 especially in junior schools. And was female dominated form the 1950s onwards. It doesn't really explore why this is. It misses it all out. And mainly it's feminine, the rise of professional working women and the increasing numbers of women going on to HE. All good things, no?

The percentage of male head teachers is barely higher than the percentage of male teachers in general…

It’s not the fault of female teachers not leaving though!
Like @Piggywaspushed I’m a bit put out by this article. I’ve taught boys almost exclusively (girls in 6th Form) for over 20 years. I’m the teacher in charge of FemSoc (and yes, a male teacher attends as well!). I think it’s just as important that they see women in leadership roles as male primary teachers.

If they want more men in schools, especially primary, they need to work on a society that assumes such men must have nefarious plans. I’ve seen automatic distrust of male primary/nursery teachers on here before. No wonder they don’t go into it (although a pleasing number of my former students have).

In junior schools, they are heavily represented as heads in comparison to class teachers.

Scarily so.

Agree

No that's not what this article is trying to say. (I've seen a few others in the news media e.g. BBC in the past week.)

They are saying you can't be what you cannot see. So boys who don't have a positive male role model in real life will look elsewhere. One way for them to have a positive male role model is to have more male classroom teachers.

Btw you aren't the first woman I know to take offence over such articles.

Apparently 26.9% male so rather hyperbolic “all headteachers are male”

@tweddler In answer to your question, yes, I would.

Our sex shouldn't impact on what we do for a living.

There are not innate 'male' and 'female' qualities and skills. Just social conditioning that wants us to believe that is so, in order to perpetuate patriarchy.

A boy should be able to look at a woman working in a job and think 'oh that looks fun, I'd like to do that', without thinking 'I can't do that because she's a woman and I'm a man.' Likewise for girls.

We need to be working towards a society where our sex doesn't matter when it comes to what is perceived as desirable or possible in terms of achievements. Continuing to reinforce the idea that UNLESS a man is doing something a boy won't want to do it, or UNLESS a woman is doing something a girl won't want to do it, continues to create a world in which sex is seen as something divisive and limiting.

15% vs 26% is hardly scarily over represented.

I get that. I'm an English teacher. I can read.

What I'm saying is that I don't agree with the 'you can't be what you can't see' approach.

I don't agree that we should be raising young people to feel that they can only be inspired by people who are the same sex as them. That attitude merely perpetuates the inequality we're trying to fight against.

@GrammarTeacher the man at my DD's nursery was bullied out.

@EnidSpyton Good luck changing society. Also it's more than just sex.

It says a third of secondary school teachers are male. They're hardly scarce then!
In primary schools - sure. But that's hardly new. I don't think increasing pay (for men or generally) will create an influx of men into primary teaching. It simply isn't a career which attracts many men.

All teachers know that pay is not the main reason for teacher shortages.

We've got to start somewhere. Change doesn't happen by itself!

I don't agree that we should be raising young people to feel that they can only be inspired by people who are the same sex as them.

this article neither explicitly says this or implicitly

It does say this. The article talks about the need for more male teachers as they are good role models for boys.

People are allowed to make dry comments and use hyperbole.

One of the points the article makes is that we need men in the classroom, not out of it. How do we persuade them to ignore the lure of promotion and higher pay? Or do we accept that they are mainly attracted to the idea of leadership and the higher status? My male headteacher readily admits his career plan was mapped out to headship within ten years with an aim of earning six figures and owning a Porsche. Perhaps the Porsche will change boys' ideas about a) teaching b) Andrew Tate.