I'm a substitute teacher in a K-8 district. I'm sticking to this part of ptozzi's assertions because this is what I know best. Regardless, I don't agree with him.
I'm not in Assessments, but from what I've gathered, it's difficult to accurately assess preschoolers (and therefore preschool teachers) because preschoolers' willingness to sit still and do what a newly-introduced adult tells them to do isn't tightly correlated with how well the kid will do later in life — or at least less tightly correlated than, say, tests given to older students. If it's tough to test the students accurately, it's tough to test the teachers. Because of this, I don't buy ptozzi's assertion that women tend to be better preschool teachers. It could be true, but I'd need to see concrete evidence in favor of this assertion.
What I have observed is that there's a general gradient in how male teachers distribute themselves across the grade range — they're loosely clustered toward the upper grades. I suspect this is because most men, on average, are more like my mother and me — they'd rather deal with preteen 'tude than little kids who cry for mommy and get only a tiny slice of all the jokes they could tell in passing. On the other hand, some do equally well at any age — I know a guy who was a happy, productive 2nd-grade teacher and was a happy, productive 7/8th-grade computer teacher.
Now, what are we to make of this?
If you want to be a teacher, make sure that you're exposed to a wide variety of classrooms (I'd certainly hope you're a substitute and getting jobs before you decide to commit to teacher credentialing classes). You may find that the kinds of kids you thought you'd like to be around aren't the ones you actually like being around. This is good advice in general, whether you're a man or a woman. Furthermore, being a man doesn't make this much better advice, I'd wager; my mother thought she'd prefer eagerer-to-please little kids, but after student teaching both 2nd graders and 5th graders, she realized she preferred older students.
If you meet a man who says he teaches, he probably teaches students who're 7th grade or older — but if he teaches younger students, that's fine too. I trust him to try to and find the age of students that he prefers, and so I feel no obligation to try and steer him to teach younger students or older students. ("How did you end up teaching the students you teach, and how do you like it compared to other grades?" is a great conversation starter at least among teachers; it's not uncommon to strike up a conversation where both participants end up saying "egads, I could never stand the kinds of students you prefer; I'd run screaming by Christmas Break").
Both bels and I agree that "usually" shouldn't be conflated with "ought"; the two may or may not have anything to do with each other. Where I think we part ways is where he appears to conflate "assumption" and "enforcement" inasmuch as he thinks both are bad. I'm against trying to steer male teachers towards or away from the younger grades (I'm anti-enforcement), but I don't think it's a bad thing to notice and discuss that men, for whatever reasons, tend to avoid the lower grades.Statistics: Posted by adiabatic — Mon Sep 26, 2016 12:21 am
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