Schools too feminine for boys

[speedymama]

Interesting article \link{http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5074794.stm\here}

I have 2 male friends who trained to be chemistry teachers and both left after 2 years teaching. One taught in a highly selective and competitive grammer school and the other at an average comprehensive. The one at the grammer school left because he had enough of the obnoxious professional parents who thought thy knew more than him and treated him and other teachers with disdain (obviously having more money they felt they had the right to do so). The one at the comp decided to leave after a group of schoolgirls kept trying to brush against him - he decided to get out before they took it on themselves to make false allegations.

IMO, society in general has to take a lot of the blame for the fall in the numbers of male teachers. How many times have you heard of parents who are ready to sue or even hit a teacher who had the temerity to have harsh words with their darling angel? In addition, this PC rubbish about not having competitive sports and not having winners or losers has got to end. Real life is about being competitive and there will always be winners and losers.

The school curriculum used to be set up for boys- now it's set up for girls, or seems to be. My boys struggle with coursework and have no problem with exams for instance.

Then again I don't think you can generalise about male teachers on the basis of two examples. I used to work with a guy who'd trsined to be a primary teacher then found he just wasn't cut out for it. I'm a parent governor in a grammar school and we have a high number of male teachers (including the head) who don't seem to have any problems. The parents at our school neither look down on the teachers nor hit them! I feel sure that the Head and/or Governors would soon sort them out if they did.

Totally and utterly agree about competitive sports, though I thought that teachers were behind the 'everyone's a winner' regime we have now?

It is very sad and worrying that there are less male teachers. No idea what the solution is though.

When my DH did his first teaching practice block in a small village school it was so odd for the kids to see a male teacher that they were till calling him 'Miss' by the time he left...

I am gutted as one of the reasons I chose ds's school was because there was a male head (primary). He is leaving, and the new head will be female which means there are now no male teachers in the school. Boys need positive male role models and they are becoming harder and harder to find.

actually I think my boy is too feminine for school, but thats another thread....

I know a teacher who says that when they get their list of pupils at the start of the year, they are disappointed if they have a high proportion of boys in the class. The whole system is designed for children to sit still all day, be quiet, be compliant and enjoy writing and crafts. It may be a harsh fact but young boys do not like this................and therefore they are seen as a problem and failures.

Boys like doing .........and should be rewarded for doing.

( I am female by the way: I just appreciate there are differences between the genders and schools should accept the same)

actually i think children like doing. I think the fact the system makes them sit still such a lot and the paucity of true experiential learning is a problem for lots of girls also.

and i have 1 of each.

yes, I think it is more accurate to say - school too rubbish for children.

I'd second that.

And adults...I went to look around the local primary, for no good reason really...

I was terrified they'd rumble me.

but it was ok, they just patronised me, and my kids.

I don't like getting too hung up on differences between genders as this can end up with those who don't fall into the stereotypical girl/boy roles getting mocked/excluded. But I do definitely think there is a problem. Actually as a girl who liked exams I would simply hate the way schools are these days. DH was of the bright but stroppy persuasion at school and we have discussed this and concluded that he would probably have achieved nothing whatsoever at school if they'd been this way in his day....

'Real life is about being competitive and there will always be winners and losers.'

yeah but.........

Actually I agree except that there are loads of kids (my eldest included) in mainstream education who cannot compete, but there is no provision / space in sn for them. Are these kids losers? really?

beyond that though agree about the parents- they don't have an anti bullying policy here because the teachers got sick of being bullied by the parents of the bullies

Well of course I did not mean that SN kids are losers. At the special needs school my 10yo nephew now attends, they play games and sports. and don't have a problem with the concept of winning and losing. IMO, it is PC brigade with their heads stuck in La La Land that seem to think kids cannot cope with the concept of winning or losing.

And some kids who are not that great in academic subjects might be winners at sport. Why shouldn't they have their moment of glory?

I know that Speedymama, but Sam doesn't unfortunately and hugely doen't understand the concept of winning and losing, and it does damage his self esteem. With ds2 and ds3 I have no issues, but these things have to be inclusive.

I too liked exams and would have absolutely hated all the coursework there is now.

I do think people learn best in different ways and although there does seem to be a gender bias to that (i.e boys prefer competition/exams, girls prefer coursework and co-operation etc) obviously there will be some girls who do better with exams and some boys who do better with coursework. What we need is some provision for this in schools.

How to do that is the thorny question.

Sports day at Ds2's school(which parents are forbidden from attending) includes an icecream eating competition.

Ah now ice cream eating I would have been fantastic at

Coursework was introduced specifically to make it "farier" to girls. Also there has been a reduction in the depth as well as breadth of science & technology teaching.
That ought not to have an effect of boys vs girls outcomes, but does.
The ratio of female to male teachers means that a boy may reach 11 without ever having a male teacher, and except for games has mostly female teachers.

A thing I have come to really dislike is the way 99% of school books show boys as the frivolous, stupid ones and girls as more responsible and "in charge". Charlie and Lola are about the only thing stopping it being 100%.

Boys do have different paths to learning, but this is often treated as simply misbehaving.

Er...I think a great reason men don't go into teaching, especially at primary level, is that it is thought of as a 'feminine' (vile word), caring sort of thing to do, as opposed to a Butch and Manly Career wielding lots of testosterone and earning lots of lovely manly money. (DD1's school is an exception, boasting both a male head and a male reception teacher, and very lovely they are too.)

Incidentally, I think the argument against competitive sport is rather good, since it's extremely important that children of all abilities are happy with physical exercise. But then I was always crap at sport - it took me till adulthood to become someone who could stop worrying about 'losing' and who now swims a mile two or three times a week.

As opposed to other subjects, where I wiped the floor with the boys.

...and I have to add that if girls were failing at school in comparative numbers there would be a great outcry at PC pointlessness in attempts to skew the school system in their favour. Just a thought.

coursework wasn't introduced just to make things faiirer to girls though was it? it was introduced to make it fairer all round - it's much harder than it used to be for the 5-10% who are naturally great at exams to sail through the course without doing any work (I know this, I am one of those people and I am female).

as for the reduction in breadth and depth of science /technology teaching - in what way? computer studies GCSE is broader now than it was when I took it (it's easy now. it was laughably easy then), or, if you're comparing things with how they were 30 years ago I would have thought that all students taking double or single science at GCSE was better than some taking just one strand and a handful taking all 3?

anyway in answer to the initial question: yes, I think the falling status of teachers is the key. and the falling status of science, come to that.

Agree with MI - you tend to have fewer men going into careers that aren't either butch or well-paid or both. Their choice. And MI's right about sport too. Old-fashioned competitive sport, with PE teachers humiliating anyone not naturally gifted, put an awful lot of people off exercise.

And I hate this generalisation that girls prefer coursework. I know loads of women and girls - including me - who were good at exams, thanks very much. Even in the days of the 11+, when the system was deliberately skewed against girls, more girls than boys passed the exam. Except there were fewer grammar school places for girls. So girls had to get a higher mark than boys to get into grammar school. We have a couple of years trying to stamp out this kind of discrimination against girls and we get howls of protest from the men's lobby.

Oh, it's so unfair that in a handful of small ways they can't get away with openly discriminating any more. The fact is the buggers still earn more than us for doing the same ruddy jobs and are favoured in all sorts of other ways too.

I can see DD1 being put off sport by the idea of 'losing'. I am going to work on finding her swimming lessons and other ways to exercise and enjoy her body - ironically rather more than I'm currently working on her schoolwork, which seems to be going fine. But physical stuff is where you very obviously 'come last' and it's very hard to take - and very easy to be put off and head to the library.