Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

ByALANNA MITCHELL
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Jan. 16, 2004
Kurt McIntosh, vice-principal of The Fish — FishervilleJunior High School in Toronto — has just been through a shattering Grade 7 class.
The students, who are overwhelmingly boys, have spent the period talking about men and the teaching profession. Asked if they would like to be teachers, the kids responded with a guffaw that filled the room. Not a chance.
"It's not in vogue," Mr. McIntosh says a few minutes later, sitting squeezed into a wooden desk. "There isn't perceived power in the role of an educator. You're not a CEO of a company. You're not making $150,000 a year. I think education is seen as that soft, nurturing profession, not the place for guys."
At 34, he is among the last of a dying breed: a young man who loves teaching so much, in fact, that he has a master's degree in the field. But in this day and age, loving teaching is a profoundly counter-cultural thing for a man to do.
Canadian men, like those in most Western countries, are leaving the profession in droves. At the beginning of the 1980s, having already retreated from most elementary classrooms, men still accounted for 44 per cent of the full-time teachers in elementary and secondary schools. Within two decades, that proportion had fallen by one-fifth to 35 per cent.
And it is poised to fall further. Teachers commonly retire in their mid-50s, and about four in every 10 of the men still in the field are over 50. The young teachers coming on board? They are overwhelmingly female. The latest statistics from the Council of Ministers of Education and Statistics Canada show that just 22 per cent of full-time teachers in their 20s are male. In Quebec, it's a mere 15 per cent.
If the trend continues, the profession will have four or five times as many women as men.
"Almost no matter what we do now, there will be a decreasing percentage of men in teaching over the next two decades," says Paul Cappon, director-general of the Council of Ministers of Education.
Which raises some tough questions. Boys are performing more and more badly in school; is this a reason why? With so few men in the classroom, who will inspire the next generation of boys to take up teaching? More fundamentally, does it even matter?
Apparently not to Grade 7 kids at The Fish. Mr. McIntosh mulls over their bruising observations. At the ripe old age of 12, they were fearlessly blunt: Maybe men just don't like kids, maybe they hate marking, maybe the pay isn't high enough.
The class batted it around in a bloodless little battle of the sexes, the girls cutting up male qualities, the boys rebutting as they roared with laughter. Finally, one boy summed it up for everyone: It's because men like to be active, play games, look to the future, explore. They don't want to be stuck in a classroom with kids. Women, on the other hand, like to take care of family, home and community. They're natural teachers.
Mr. McIntosh has heard that before. He had to break through the same stereotype when he went to teachers' college, which he chose over sports medicine. How did he do it? He grins conspiratorially. By taking biology and chemistry — that was the "safe" way in.
"I'm a guy teaching sciences," he says, lightly pounding the table to mimic a macho man. "And that's okay."
There has been little hard research on whether male teachers really are better for boys. But because boys' results on literacy tests in many parts of the world are dramatically worse than those of girls, the examination has begun, especially in Australia, where the decline of the male teacher is a national heartache.
The worry is that, if boys are taught reading and writing exclusively by women, they may suspect that reading and writing simply aren't for men. Worse still, it may be more difficult for boys to learn from women than from men, some of the Australian researchers say. That may mean that boys simply aren't being pushed enough.
Anecdotally, many teachers are convinced that boys learn differently, in a more masculine way, from girls, and that male teachers are more capable of plugging into that. They routinely talk about how boys must have short, focused lessons and must take information in sprints, not marathons.
They say boys need their learning to be built around games and competition if it is to make sense to them. They need to move around. They need instructions repeated. When they write, they need to talk about what they are going to write first, and put pencil to paper afterward. They seem to be hard-wired to fight, win or lose, and live to fight another day.
Girls, on the other hand, like to process information over time, discuss things, follow directions, co-operate, collaborate, sit still, read and write at length.
This is perhaps unfairly general. And it runs against the idea that there are no gender differences, only different types of individual learners, but the principal at Fisherville, Karen Falconer, isn't taking any chances. Not only has she made it her mission to enlist more men, she has launched a pilot project that will segregate boys and girls in two Grade 7 classes next year. In an ideal world, the girls will end up being taught by a woman, and the boys by a man.
She's driven by the numbers and by an ideal of equality, for the boys' sake.
Last year, 20 per cent more girls than boys in Grades 7 and 8 at The Fish earned an A or B in all subjects. In Grade 9, about 30 per cent more girls earned an A or B in English, while the gap was 38 per cent in science, and 15 per cent in math, the traditional male stronghold.
According to a study published last year, this situation is found throughout countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. But Ms. Falconer hopes the boy-centred class will to restore some equilibrium. If not, how will boys even get into university, let alone make it through teachers' college?
David Fraser chose teaching over law. Now 41 and a Grade 6 teacher, he remembers what it was like when he started at Brown Elementary School in downtown Toronto a few years ago. There were only two other guys on a staff of more than 20. It was like hanging out with mom.
There were a lot of ladies there, and they were older ladies. And I said: 'Oh, my god. They are lovely ladies, but what do I talk to them about?'."
His principal at the time was none other than Ms. Falconer. She pulled him aside one day and asked how she could recruit more men. And keep them. By the time she left x last year, Brown sported a tight male cabal of eight.
They have a football machine in the staff room, placed there just for the guys. During breaks, the female teachers gather in the room to talk, to process what's gone on in class, to comfort each other. The guys run in, play football, compete like crazy, laugh their heads off and then dash back to class. Sometimes they even have football matches after school ends on Friday.
The men have an informal club with rules: Never talk business. Never be negative. Never complain. They have even developed a hazing routine for new members, who are called "Rook" until they pass 10 specific tests.
"It's what makes it feel good," Mr. Fraser said. "You just create an atmosphere of fun and laughter and that this is the place to be. And they come."
If teaching can be so much fun, why are so few men showing up? The theories are legion, and they touch on some sore points: What, in society, are men and women for? Is the great striving to even out the gender disparities in the workplace doomed to failure? Does it even matter who does what?
Teachers make up Canada's largest technical or professional occupation, according to the most recent census. So whatever happens in teaching is more than symbolic; it carries weight.
Jane Gaskell, dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, said it may be that women, long a power in elementary teaching, are finally cracking the barriers in secondary schools. Subjects such as science, math and social studies dominated by men since the 1940s are increasingly open to women.
"I think," she said, "it means schools are becoming environments where women prosper."
Historically, men always dominated teaching, although it was largely a female profession in North America in the early part of this century. Men began flooding into it in the 1930s when education was considered a proxy for adapting to modern life.
Teaching science, technology, carpentry, electrical work and electronics was appealing, explains Dr. Cappon of the Council of Ministers of Education.
"It was learning to do, not just learning to know."
Also, the current feminization of the classroom may just reflect the fact that more women than men are now graduating from university — the split is 60-40 for undergraduate degrees — which means there is a much bigger pool of female teaching talent. There are, Dr. Cappon points out, simply more educated women than there have ever been before in Canada's history.
Not only that, teaching salaries have slipped of late, after keeping pace with inflation, and with those in similar professions, through the 1970s and 1980s. On average, librarians, social workers and drafting people now make about 10 per cent more than teachers, whose salaries range from $35,000 to $75,000. In each case, Australian teachers make more .
And then there is the touchy question of prestige. Along with the salaries, says Ben Levin, a professor of education at the University of Manitoba and an international education consultant, the cachet has eroded in the past 10 years. "Teachers have been whacked around in the public discourse."
He points to one of his own classes: Of 65 students, about seven are male. "Most of the young women in this class are talented, capable, caring. They like children. Many don't even know what teachers get paid."
In some ways, that's positive, he said, because these women are going into the profession for the love of it, not for money or prestige. And the men? Maybe the men, just like the Fisherville kids said, are going into jobs where they get paid more and don't have to work so hard.
That's exactly what's happening, says Doug Willard, 53, a former head of the Canadian Teachers' Federation who taught for 30 years in rural Saskatchewan.
As head of the federation, he interviewed teachers who were leaving the profession. The men were clear about why they were getting out. "They would say: 'I can't work this hard for what I get out of it.'."
Another problem, he says, is that teaching has become demoralizing. Somehow, the recent crop of education bureaucrats has come to believe that, if it just gives teachers the right curriculum and if teachers just tell the kids they have to learn, the kids will do so. But learning and teaching are far more complex operations than that.
Mr. Willard retired last year and has considered supply teaching, but isn't sure he wants the stress.
"There are lots of positives..... but all you ever hear is how poor the teaching is, and how the kids aren't standing up to competition. I think as much as we would like to congratulate ourselves about the achievements of gender equality, men are just more mobile than women and they're getting other jobs."
Does it matter? "I think it does," he said. "If we fill the schools with just one gender, I think students are losing something."
Murad Doray, 37, is in the middle of a case in point. He is teaching a Grade 9 health class at The Fish, a room filled with exuberant, if slightly embarrassed testosterone.
It's a 14-step lesson on how to put on, and then take off, a condom, faking intercourse in between. Mr. Doray pulls out a wooden prosthesis and a foil packet. Then he asks for a volunteer. The boys redden and finally nominate Vadim Ratkevich.
As Vadim comes forward, another boy shouts out: "Which condom is the best?" Unfazed, Mr. Doray replies: "Any you can buy in North America is okay."
The boys concentrate on the package, the prosthesis, the condom, pressing the air out of the condom's tip. Vadim is to simulate what's supposed to happen next, and a classmate whispers: "I feel sorry for you."
Finally, the demonstration ends, and Mr. Doray, as his boys prepare one-minute presentations, ponders how things would have gone had he been a woman.
"It's tough for a 14-year-old male to ask questions about sex. It's really asking a lot for a 14-year-old male to ask questions about sex of a female teacher."
But he also knows perfectly well that boys now shy away from teaching. "These kids are bombarded by messages of how to measure their virility against money.
"But teaching is a calling. Unless you love it, there's no enticement, either politically or financially."
Alanna Mitchell is a senior feature writer with The Globe and Mail.

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