the male effect in teaching

One obnoxious thing about being a teacher, especially a female teacher, is that getting maximum results from your male students can be very difficult. One thing I've noticed is that the way male students respond to a male teacher is like night and day. This is most obviously manifested in the area of behavior, but impacts academics as well. This effect no doubt accounts for the lasting appeal of single gender education in all of its various permutations. As an egalitarian, this has always bothered me. I could be wrong about this, but I strongly suspect that much of what is working for male teachers with boys is the simple fact that the teacher is male.

I contemplated "the male effect" a lot during student teaching because I got to observe a lot of classes with male teachers, worked in conjunction with several male teachers, and am currently working with several male teachers while subbing. What I've noticed that boys really seem to respond in a profoundly different way to male teachers--or even just adult males in the room. My most disruptive students were ANGELS on the days my field supervisor visited the classes to observe me--they behaved even better for him than when even the principal was there. Why were they so good? I don't think it was to make me look good. I really honestly think that it was because my field supervisor looked like a football coach! He was this massively built Italian guy who showed up at school dressed to the nines and absolutely gave off coach vibes.

This is even more noticeable when the students and the teacher come from similar backgrounds, which is why I always wish there were more minority male teachers (one of the most devastating effects of NCLB is that it makes it very difficult to recruit minority teachers, so when you go to staff meetings and such, you'll notice that no matter what the student demographics are in a school, the staff is usually a sea of white faces).

It doesn't seem to matter what methods the male teacher uses as far as I can tell, it simply seems to be a gender thing. Now to take that a step further, if you have boys in a room with a male teacher who happens to be a really masterful teacher and a good reader of kids, then it's downright spooky. I call this the "Waller Effect", after a teacher I knew during student teaching. Not only does he have the "male effect" going for him, but he's also a really good teacher who totally gets kids, and when he's around, nobody plays around or sets one foot out of line. He's one of the only male teachers at the school, and the rest of the staff just marvels at how well the kids behave for him.

So that's my observation. It's just one of those human dynamics at work, and an inevitable consequence of living in a patriarchal social arrangement. Most boys just seem to respond better to male teachers, and gender convergence is probably more than half of what's going on. As the saying goes, it's a "guy thing". Does this necessarily mean that all male teachers are automatically successful with all boys? Well no, but they start out with a playing field that's tilted in favor of their efforts. I've also seen plenty of male teachers totally squander this natural advantage by not having a clue about how kids work. So ultimately gender isn't everything, but it does seem to matter quite a bit.

For those of us who happen to have two X chromosomes, it just means that we have to try a lot harder to figure out those boys, how to respond to them, and how to make sure we are meeting their needs.