Schools too feminine for boys

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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.

yes, I agree with you too, mi on competetive sports. they should also ban picking teams, or should at least let the team captians pick the first half and then divide the other half randomly. being last picked for hockey is one of my most enduring memories of sport at school, and one followed by skiving off to have a fag behind the school.

I would like, also, to think that 'real life' is not simply a matter of winning and losing: that it's also a matter of cooperation, negotiation, working together and appreciating difference. But then I'm a wishy washy liberal type with an English degree and a compost heap.

It would be nice if small class sizes and a flexible curriculum allowed all children to be taught in a way that fit with their individual learning styles. Excellent teachers manage to do this - unfortunately most of the teachers I have met are aiming at satisfactory.

I have to agree with you motherinferior. Teaching is no longer a high status profession and is relativly poorly paid for the amount of qualifications you need.

You see more male teachers in the higher ends of the education system. It's far higher status to call yourself a 'lecturer' than a teacher. Consequently you see more males in colleges and universities.

As for pay levels..HA!! I regularly run into my ex-students, who having left college with some very poor A levels and being, quite frankly, semi literate at best, and discover they are earning far more than me.

So why are there not more female teachers at colleges and universities? Is it because they don't apply or because the system is biased and won't employ them in those positions?

A friend who has just finished her english PGCE wrote an essay on this and she said she found out that a lot of the idea of schools being anti-male are a bit rubbish. For example she said that all of the GCSE texts for english lit are male based and accessible to boys, when choosing one she found it very hard to get one that appealed to the girls at all.

That's interesting, Smurfgirl.