WHY MEN DON’T TEACH ELEMENTARY SCHOOL: In pointing out various examples of sexual misconduct by female teachers, I regularly note that men are less likely to enter teaching because male teachers are suspected of being likely predators. Note this story, which would be treated as a damning example of racism if it were about a black teacher, but is treated as just the way things are since it’s sexism aimed at a male one:
Stereotypes about male teachers, and sometimes mistrust, persist.
“It’s very hard to change the suspicion of men who are going to elementary education when there are so few of them,” Thompson said. “Schools ask me to talk to men on their faculty and when I sit with them behind closed doors, they say the moms look at them like potential pedophiles.
“If they are too nurturing or a mother comes in and sees a teacher reading in a chair and the child is leaning against the teacher or cuddling him, they freak out,” he said. “Men tell me they only have to look in the mom’s face to know what they are thinking.” . . . “I would have literally four or five parents sitting at a table at a certain point in the year observing me,” Wiederspan said. “And it was nerve-wracking as an untenured teacher.”
What’s funny, as I’ve noted before, is that if you watch old movies, or even cartoons, it’s regularly assumed that adult males have nurturing instincts. Only in our supposedly progressive era are men reduced to cardboard cutouts dominated by lust and Mammon.
