Clyde Castile teaches 3- and 4-year-old children the fundamentals of tying their shoes and learning what it means to go to school.
He is the only male preschool teacher in the entire Mesa, Ariz., school district.
"I really see myself in elementary education," he says, "especially with younger children. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoy it."
What makes Castile and other men like him so unusual is not that they chose teaching as a profession but that they chose elementary education. This makes them part of a special group: currently, only about one in every six men who goes into teaching chooses elementary education as a career, according to experts.
This may soon change. According to statistics published by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit educational research organization based in Washington, D.C., nearly 2 million new teachers will be needed in U.S. schools by 2010. With such a great need for more instructors, experts wonder, why don't more men like Clyde Castile choose elementary education, and what can be done to find more like him?
Breaking Traditions?
The fact that most male teachers do not choose elementary education has been an open secret in the educational community for years. "The vast majority of people who teach young children continue to be female," says Barbara Willer, the deputy executive director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children in Washington, D.C. "Society's perspectives are changing, but in the minds of many people, working with young children and nurturing them is something that is traditionally more associated with women rather than men."
Teaching at the secondary level, officials theorize, might be more attractive to men because of the greater opportunities to coach and because it offers a chance to "step up" to the principalship.
"I think there are probably a lot of men who are looking for coaching positions or who want to be an administrator and are looking to make that jump," agrees Castile. "I know a lot of people who have moved on that way."
But not everyone shares this perspective. "The notion that men get into teaching as a means of stepping up to the principalship is a myth," asserts Paul Sargent, assistant professor of sociology at San Diego State University and author of Real Men or Real Teachers? "The principalship is a whole different career from teaching." Rather than entering the teaching profession to move up, Sargent says, many men may actually feel pushed into the principalship because they do not "fit in" with the predominantly female faculty often found at the elementary level. "If you walk into the teachers' lounge and the conversation suddenly stops, or if you're the only person on the staff getting a flyer in your mailbox about a new coaching position at another school, sooner or later you're going to get the message that you don't belong," Sargent says. "And one of the escape rungs is to move into a nonteaching position like the principalship."
Harmful Stereotypes
According to Sargent and others, many male teachers also have another fear: that they will be viewed with apprehension because they want to work with small children. "There is a tremendous amount of suspicion in society about men who work with small children," he points out. "Whenever the subject of men and children comes up in the media, it's usually associated with something negative, like abandonment or abuse."
These concerns and their ramifications are voiced by some teachers as well. "This was one of the reasons I felt I had to get out of preschool special education," says Paul Shaffer, a 3rd grade teacher at Helen Keller Elementary School in Mesa, Ariz. "I found that I had to be very careful with what I was doing and seeing; I had to redirect a lot of children, so in the end I thought that I'd better just protect myself and get into 3rd grade regular education."
To get around pats on the back and hugs, teachers such as Ron Scott, a kindergarten teacher at Keller, master the "art of the side hug" and prefer giving "high fives." The necessity of such measures is painful, however. "Kids may just need a hug," Scott said. "They come up and put their arms around your legs, and you can't just push someone away, but at the same time, you really need to be careful so nothing is misinterpreted."
In response to such concerns, many schools have adopted strict guidelines to educate their staffs—both male and female—about ways to avoid compromising situations with students.
Filling a Future Void
Despite such difficulties, many experts feel that society's perspectives about men and elementary education are going to have to change in the near future. "Some people might wonder whether it matters that men don't teach elementary education," says Sargent. "Aside from the fact that our children are going to get the message that teaching is a female-only profession if all they see are women teachers, we need to realize that if we're going to need more educators, we can't continue to block out half our population from the job pool."
Changing such statistics, experts say, will not only help fill the teaching ranks but can provide profound rewards for those willing to take up the profession. "It's hard to put this into words," says John Vasey, a 6th grade teacher with Acacia Elementary School in Phoenix, Ariz. "But to me, teaching is not a job, it's a passion—no matter how tough it gets, it's still something that I enjoy every day, and I don't see myself ever getting tired of it."
