Male Teachers in All-Girls Schools

Let’s all pause for a silent moment of compassion for young male teachers in all-girls high schools. Theirs is a difficult job.

Riiiiiight, some of you young men may be thinking. I’ll sign up for that work.

But that sense of the young male teacher’s plight is one clear impression I’ve gained from a decidedly unscientific survey I recently completed of fifty of my former students, girls I taught when they were juniors or seniors at a private, all-girls high school outside Boston, from which I recently retired. I contacted these young women, all of them now college students or recent college graduates, to get a sense of how they perceived their male and female teachers in high school.

I asked each of my former students if she would tell me how she regarded her male and female teachers (not individually, by name, but as genders). I wrote to each of them:

Recognizing that these things vary by individuals, both teachers and students, is there anything we can say about how male vs. female teachers treat female students? And is there anything we can say about how female students treat their male vs. female teachers? I’m not talking here about any difference in the quality of teaching by male or female teachers, but how students treat them, and how, in turn, students are treated by teachers of different gender.

My interest in these questions came, at least in part, from comments I heard from female teachers over the years. Some of them, especially the older ones, felt invisible to their students or felt the girls simply liked the male teachers more than their female counterparts; the male teachers seemed to receive all the attention. According to such complaints, the girls were more likely to make male teachers the subjects of their comedy skits, for example, or cast male teachers in the videos they would make for all-school events. These were seen as evidence of students’ greater affection for the male faculty.

Having wondered over the years whether there was any substance to my female colleagues’ perceptions, I did a Web search that failed to produce much in the way of scholarly or journalistic information on this subject. So, I simply decided to go to the source—the girls themselves—and ask them about it. Forty-six of the 50 young women I contacted wrote back to me. Here’s some of what I learned, with more to come later.

Two principal themes emerged from the responses I received. The first is that, contrary to what some of my female teaching colleagues believed, the girls respected them more than they did their male teachers. More than half of my respondents made comments indicating that their female teachers commanded more student respect because they were stricter, more demanding, more focused in class, less likely to be nudged off topic, etc. One student wrote:

I’ve noticed that female teachers expect more of their female students than male teachers do. Maybe this is because the female teachers recognize a potential in a female student that they once saw in themselves. And perhaps the female students take their female teachers more seriously in response to the higher expectations.

Some of the students noted that the older female teachers were nurturing and “maternal” in the way they dealt with the girls; many found that comforting, others found it off-putting (“no one wants a second mom”).

If respect for female teachers was the leitmotif in most of the students’ comments, the constant refrain was that they felt more comfortable around the male teachers, who seemed less intimidating than most of the female teachers and brought far more humor into the classroom. This latter point was a constant in the commentary—the observation that the male teachers joked around with their students much more than the female teachers did and created an easy-going atmosphere in the classroom. One student, now a college sophomore, wrote:

As a general rule, I’d say our male teachers were more relaxed around us, and more willing to have fun with us. Granted, there were definitely awkward teachers or moments, but generally I think my male teachers were more interested in being friendly with us. Admittedly, we could get away with more with the male teachers. It was almost like our female teachers knew our game better and weren’t willing to play it. I would say generally our female teachers were more uptight and less friendly. They were more interested in getting the job done.

Another student wrote:

I think we tended to become more comfortable around the male teachers because they seemed more laid back than many of the female teachers. I think we also believed we could get away with more (extending deadlines, delaying a test) with the male teachers compared with the female teachers, who wouldn’t put up with it.

A different recurring observation in my former students’ commentaries made it clear that the age of their teachers often seemed to matter more than the gender. Young female teachers were prized because they are “easier to talk to and relate to,” some of them “willing to be a friend of sorts, asking about your personal life and sharing school gossip.”

A senior at a west-coast university observed:

I don’t think there’s generally a huge difference as far as gender is concerned. The teacher’s personality matters more than gender. The big exception would be young male teachers. We gave them so much shit. Poor Smith and Jones [names changed to protect the victimized]. Senior year I would make intense eyes at Jones and toss my hair whenever I saw him just to watch him squirm. We didn’t take young male teachers seriously. We’d giggle loudly whenever they walked by the couches [the students’ lounge area]. The other exception is that male teachers usually totally freak out at the sight of tears or any mention of ‘women’s troubles,’ and I know some girls took advantage of that.

I know this was true about the way the students teased and harassed the younger male teachers. I observed it myself.

Probably the most horrific story I received along these lines actually involved these girls when they were still in the school’s lower grades (there’s a middle school, too, with grades five through eight). One of them, now at a university in the Boston area, reminded me of a story I had heard from multiple sources over the years:

The only time I think there was any difference [in the way we interacted with male vs. female teachers] was possibly in middle school when girls thought they could get away with things if they related them to “female problems” with the male teachers. One instance that comes to mind is when a student threw pads and tampons around the room to make a male teacher feel uncomfortable and then asked if she could be excused.

That wouldn’t happen in a classroom with a female as the teacher, nor in a classroom headed by an older male. As I said at the start, when I think about the plight of inexperienced, young male teachers in an all-girls school, I feel compassion.

I should note, by way of conclusion, that perhaps I was oblivious to the truths around me, but I never felt I was at any advantage or disadvantage relative to the female teachers in dealing with my students. But maybe I should have. The best-known study on how a teacher’s gender matters, published in 2006 by Thomas Dee of Stanford University, found that middle-school boys learn more from men and middle-school girls learn more from women. Dee found that having a teacher of the opposite sex hurts a student’s academic progress. Though controversial, Dee’s findings raise serious questions that education researchers should explore.

And my informal inquiry suggests that, at least in an all-girls school, male teachers have to fight the desire to be liked and work on those behaviors that produce respect. And young male teachers in such settings apparently need to understand that they’re swimming with sharks.

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This post originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com on March 28, 2013.

The Scourge of Grading

Despite what many outsiders may think of teachers and their work lives, it’s a demanding occupation. My wife and I received a Christmas card from a former colleague of hers, an accomplished woman who previously had a successful career in economic analysis of energy issues and who recently had become a high-school teacher. She wrote that it is “the hardest job” she’s ever had — also the most satisfying.

I didn’t have difficulty understanding either part of her assessment. But as I thought about her and her new job, I found myself thinking more about what’s hard about it. For one thing, this person is still in her first year of teaching, which is notoriously demanding. I don’t believe I ever worked harder or longer hours than I did in my first year of teaching high school — and that includes my graduate school years and my first years of teaching at the college level.

After that first or second year, the workload becomes more manageable, but the hardest — and, to me, most stressful and distressing — part of the job remains: grading students’ work. It’s the part of the job that, in my opinion, induces the greatest uncertainty, discomfort, and angst.

I know that some teachers actually enjoy grading. They say they find it interesting to see what their students have learned and how they’re doing. I admire that attitude. And it’s certainly true that there is the positive feeling that comes from the occasional observation of student improvement, from either increased effort or better understanding of the material. But apart from that, I was never able to get myself into the frame of mind where I could find grading bearable, much less enjoy it. Why not? Multiple factors and worries contributed to the pain:

• The sheer drudgery and tedium.  When you’re two-thirds of the way through 35 essays on why the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland is important for an understanding of the development of American federalism, it takes a strong spirit not to want to poke your eyes out with a steak knife rather than read one more. I have lots of friends who are teachers and professors. Their tweets and Facebook status updates when they’re in the midst of grading provide glimpses into minds on the edge of the abyss — and, in some cases, the already deranged.
• The poor quality of students’ writing. One of the great contributors to the drudgery and tedium is the horrid writing one routinely encounters. Most kids don’t read much any more. As a consequence, they don’t know how to write. It takes lots of time and effort to wade through the slop they hand in.
• Concerns about whether our tests gauge what students know.  As teachers, we think we’re clear about signaling to our students what we want them to pay special attention to — what facts, concepts, frameworks they should focus on in their studying. But none of us communicates perfectly. When we pose an essay question about, say, McCulloch v. Maryland, are we being unfair to the student who can’t say anything meaningful about that case but can tell you everything worth knowing (and more) about the decision five years later in Gibbons v. Ogden?
• Concerns about whether you’re testing what’s worth knowing.  Maybe that kid’s right–the one in the back row who says, “Why do we need to know any of this detail? Who cares about Supreme Court cases from two hundred years ago? Isn’t it enough to understand the contemporary state of American federalism? And maybe get that the conflicts underpinning these cases continue today?” Maybe so. Just because I’m a teacher doesn’t make me infallible as a sifter and sorter of “important” information.
• Concerns about what to weigh in making judgments.  Every teacher has had the experience of handing back to a student a piece of work that merited a lower grade than the student was expecting and getting the comment, freighted with frustration and disappointment, “But I worked so hard on this.” Probably so. But isn’t the product of the work, not the effort itself, what the teacher must judge? I think so. But does that mean effort counts for nothing? And what about a science teacher who agonizes about whether she should consider grammar and syntax when grading lab reports?
• Concerns about equity and fairness. No matter how hard you try, you realize there’s a good chance you’re grading some students more harshly than they deserve, and giving others more credit than they deserve. This doesn’t have anything to do with favoritism (a whole other problem), but with human error and weakness. Your temperament and disposition change over the hours or days you spend grading an assignment. In fact, your frame of mind can change in moments for any number of reasons: five weak essays in a row can put you in a foul mood; fatigue can set in; a too-hot or too-noisy room can set your nerves on edge; maybe you’re suddenly reminded that you have only 48 hours left to finish clearing out your deceased parent’s apartment. How can any teacher be confident that his or her assessment of student work is always fair and accurate in the face of such vagaries?  An essay that earns a B+ at one moment might earn a B- the next day. It shouldn’t be that way, but any honest teacher will admit it’s true.
• Concerns about comparability of our evaluations. How do my judgments about this essay or term paper — or of this student over the course of a semester — compare with the judgments one of my colleagues down the hall would make of the same work?  That is, there are even larger concerns about equity when the same student who earns a B from me would get a C in Ms. Smith’s class or an A in Mr. Brown’s. That same concern gets magnified, of course, when one broadens the field of vision to include whole school districts, states, or the nation as a whole.

Some people may find in this last point the basis for an argument in favor of statewide (or nationwide) standardized tests. I do not. I believe mandatory testing of that sort has been harmful to American education, but that’s a topic I’ll take up on another occasion.

Anyone who’s taught for a number of years could add to this litany of woes. So could I. In any case, these are some of the worries that combined to make grading students’ work a singularly unpleasant and stressful task, for me at least.

Having retired from teaching last June, I’ve graded my last test, plowed through my last set of essays, read my last term paper. I wish I could impart to colleagues still in the trenches some wisdom about how to make grading less agonizing. Alas, I don’t know how to solve most of the core dilemmas outlined above. But with respect to one, the drudgery and tedium associated with grading, there are, of course, time-tested methods that teachers have been using for years; here are a few to consider. Alcohol also helps, but exacerbates some of the concerns above. In any case, whatever else you do, lock away those steak knives.

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This piece originally appeared on January 9 at TheAtlantic.com