I'm having a hard time relating to this and recent posts about childhood education. When I was 3 my mother tried to put me in a pre-K school and I fled for the woods. At 5, I couldn't wait to go. Spending billions on pre-K sounds like parents today wanting free nanny care. The idea 5-yr old boys are too immature for school is equally nuts. Pushing kids ahead is also dumb. After second grade, my teacher said I should skip a grade. My Mom said screw off, and we left for Malaysia where she taught me for a year. A close childhood friend was similarly pushed a year ahead (also a boy); his parent said great; our child's a genius. He went to Harvard and has been in a mental institution since.
I guess I don’t understand the criticism here. “here are some problems that disparately impact group X and here are some nominally neutral solutions which would nonetheless particularly help group X” is a perfectly respectable book to write, whether it’s about race or gender or whatever. And I think the whys are important: you can’t just write your education policy book and declare that we need more voctec training or whatever without being intellectually curious enough to dig into the numbers and see who it would help.
Hi all lots of men here with ideas on teaching. I will say if you want to make a career switch subbing is not a bad way in. Try elementry school. Kinder is hard but i was surprised how much i like first grade.
I found 3rd-6th grade to be my favorite types of kids to supervise: old enough that they're able to do most things on their own, but young enough that they enjoy and want to do things with you.
As the comedian Ron White observed, regarding Hurricanes, it's not that the wind blows it's what the wind blows.. Culture wars notwithstanding, when it comes to primary and secondary education the reverse is true. It's not what the student reads, it's that the student reads. To this end the ESL teachers I have known over the years, and that's just four, do not give a crap what engages their students. Comics, Manga, car mags, children's or YA literature, Harlequin romances did not matter. You can learn fundamental skills from any written work.
I would go somewhat farther than many perhaps when it comes to reading. Virtually anyone can learn to speed read, The techniques are quite mechanical but result in superior retention of content and the ability to absorb masses of material. Nothing teaches you to love reading more than the ability to read fast and well and to remember with clarity what you have read. The more you read the more you have to think about and ,most importantly, the more you can think about. Grist for the mill.
My wife has a sad story in this context of her father, a Phd mathematician and qualified actuary, had a midlife crisis and decided that teaching math in high school was he wanted to do. He got shredded in an urban public school with boys who had zero interest, and ended up going back to being an actuary (which definitely paid better). Obviously that is anecdotal, but i am sceptical "recruit more male teachers" is a practical answer. Maybe more community college and apprenticeship options so boys oncd grown up a bit get steered into adult education might be the way to go?
Yeah, that is consistent with my wife's story then.
I wonder do boys do better in single sex schools? I went to an all boys school, but i don't know if that is advantageous for boys. My mother was a teacher and definitely believed not having boys around was good for girls education, but i don't know if it works the other way.
Another excellent newsletter, Matt! Many many years ago I was a Middle School teacher and was known as a “Specialist” in reading and Middle School. First and foremost I loudly applaud your call for a return to Phonics, especially for beginning readers!! Then we get into a myriad of ways boys fall behind and what might be done.
Boys are more frequently afflicted with ADHD and have problems with attention and behavior in a regular classroom. Girls, on the other hand, tend to be quieter and spend more time making their papers look clean & neat. For this they after get a big grade boost. Also girls social skills generally develop at a faster rate. For Middle School, the hormonal years, I would Hate to have older more developed boys in a class with 12-13 year old girls who think they are 25! However, we can do a much better job with boys in the earlier grades. We get reports about the success found from recruiting retired men to teach, particularly in elementary school. Both boys and girls can relate to a “Grandfather” type who likes kids. Because of Certifications some provision should be made so they can teach Public School. Perhaps retired men could work a first year as an Assistant Teacher and take their own class the next year.
Better Parent/School Relations need to begin with Workshop (Summer?) consisting of Teachers, Administrators and Parents. There needs to be agreement at the outset about expectations and costs. By that, IMHO, I mean a School Board should not have the final say about goals, outcomes and costs related to achieving desired outcomes. Putting a group of ADHD boys in a top level reading group with boys and girls with advanced reading skills is only going to result in the less-skilled ones disrupting class to slow it down and complaints about homework.
I could write about many other ways we can give boys incentives to become a teammate in their own learning, but I don’t want to be a bore. More pictures with words at every level, teach kids how to Read Math symbols and word questions, many more Voc/Ed Programs, welcome a wide variety of workers electricians, plumbers, etc. to tell classes how they got there as well as what they do. Today’s kids are not generally used to being told, “like it or lump it” or “You just need to try harder” or even “No one can do it for you…”. Change is possible but I think we need to directly address the fact that Teachers are not going to be able to address every individual need all day. While no one wants cruelty, there must again be some ways teachers can discipline students’ behavior. If an student has psychiatric problems, a place needs to be made for that student before making every state provide Pre-K or Nursery School even if the latter are good ideas.
On Matt's last points I would like to volunteer my own services as a provider of "Wisdoms of the Ancients" by quoting The Hold Stead: "Guys go for looks, girls go for status." Full article here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UipHxGkcgEY
He's a traditionalist intellectual and social media personality who believes lots of fairly banal, conservative-coded things (like what Matt wrote about), and some really weird things (I think he went on an all meat diet?), along with some things that could be construed as offensive in some quarters. Progressives hate him to an irrational degree, and his fanboys think he is more revolutionary and profound than he really is.
On MY's last paragraph, there is a considerable strand of professional class progressives who follow the "success sequence" in their own lives but don't preach what they practice. They graduate high school, go to college, find a stable job, get married, and then have kids. But then they don't tell others that doing so is a good thing, and also say that less beneficial life choices of lower status people are good things. It's one thing for the peers of a working class male to reinforce their decisions to sleep around and smoke weed all day, but when higher status people (who this person wishes he was like) tell them that those are fine life choices, they really have no examples and reinforcement of more beneficial life choices.
So today I listened to a podcast with Reeves as the guest. He brought up the "success sequence" and basically said the same thing MY does. He also added that the "new" marriage of professional class progressives is not the "old" type of marriage based on a male bread-winner that conservatives supposedly solely believe in, but instead is based more on equality. He said therefore conservatives don't know what they are asking for with respect to the success sequence. My response is I don't really care what philosophical reasons people use to justify getting married, having a two-parent household is better for kids. PMC progressives shouldn't be ashamed to say so, and more importantly, they shouldn't condone poor life choices of lower class people for social justice reasons.
I think MY and Reeves underestimate progressives' cultural power in regard to this. Yes, a single lawyer or software engineer or consultant doesn't have much cultural impact, but their kids who produce Youtube videos,Tik-Toks, Instagram posts, and work in TV, film, and journalism certainly do. Instilling in their kids the valuing of two-parent households would do a lot more to promote two-parent households than any government policy.
Also, on Matt's piece, I'm perfectly fine with widely available, inexpensive contraceptives. Make most oral contraceptives OTC. Heck, put condom dispensers in high school bathrooms and locker rooms.
This year, the community college I work at had an increase in the number and proportion of men earning a credential but when I looked deeper, I found it was due entirely to an increase in men earning short-term credentials, like welding and diesel repair.
(They were still a minority of graduates but not by as much.)
Also, men are underrepresented in online classes and this is well known in the literature but when I looked for reasons why, no one knows. I think this was a mostly problem during school shutdowns, but on the margin it means male students are less flexible in their course choices and may be less likely to attend college as a working adult. (Fully-online students tend to be older female students; traditional-age students often mix online and in-person classes, which I think lets them take more courses in a semester.)
As a man who considered at various times becoming a teacher, but ultimately didn't, I feel like I have an interesting perspective here.
To me, the main thing that stopped me wasn't money really (though probably that should have been enough) but the massive amounts of bullshit around teaching. I was not interested in going back to school for X years just to be a teacher, and despite being a smart guy with relevant degrees, there was no straightforward way to get some practical training and jump in. Aside from that, I heard a lot of horror stories at the amount of bullshit teachers are expected to just put up with. Bullshit from administrators, bullshit from school boards, bullshit from parents, and bullshit from regulators. It seemed like the primary skill leading to success for the modern educator was a willingness to tolerate massive amounts of bullshit.
My guess is that, in a patriarchal world, women are exposed to more bullshit on an everyday basis, and are therefore better equipped to deal with that bullshit. And also due to patriarchy, the bullshit gap between the education world and the regular world is probably less - not because they don't have to put up with education bullshit, but because they'd have to put up with a lot of bullshit anywhere else just for being a woman, and at least in education the bullshit is well-documented and applied equally to all.
A final piece is that I think that education leans towards stability over dynamism and flexibility. Going into education means you have a pretty structured way to go find a job, there's well-defined credentials you can pursue to advance upwards, and you can probably find work most places. This probably appeals temperamentally to young women more than it does to young men.
So overall, if you're a smart young guy with other good options and a preference for a more dynamic, less structured sort of environment, education is just a pretty terrible fit right now.
This is especially true for the schools pushing for more black men specifically. With so many large corporations make a big push to bring in more diveristy if you're a black man with a college degree you're going to have better options than teaching.
I once taught kids how to use computers at an after school organization as a bridge job immediately after college. I enjoyed it just fine, but a big reason I did is because I had very wide latitude on how I could teach since being there was a privilege and not an entitlement for the kids. When a few people asked me if I wanted to keep teaching, I said hell no, because I knew I did not want to deal with the bullshit that you precisely describe here.
Hell, even if you are a teacher, it's sometimes hard to get into the job. I taught for six years, moved to a new state and was told my certificate was no good. To get the right cert, I would have to go back to school for an undergrad or masters that included initial teacher certification. Wasn't going to do that again, so I enrolled in a doctorate instead.
To your point about getting practical training, it will be interesting in a few years to see how these alternative pathways have played out. Sure, we've had stuff like TFA and teacher residencies around for a few years, but they're small. It's only recently that entire states have opened up the teaching pool to, say, anyone who's a veteran of the armed forces.
I will add that stability was not a feature of teaching for me. Every year there were new directives, new curriculum, new tests, new administrators, and so on. While my job title didn't change, the bullshit did and it's the bullshit that makes the job feel unstable and unsustainable.
That's fair on the stability point. What I meant was really more like life path stability - it seems from what I've seen that teaching has an appeal for people who want to stay in one place, get married, and raise a family. But as you noted, even trying to move to another state screws everything up.
Each state controls licensure and each state can decide whether or not there is reciprocity with each other state's license.
In my case, the requirement in the new state was that I had taught continuously in the same position for 5 years and they'd accept my cert. Not necessarily at the same school but as, say, an English teacher in a school full-time. I ran into two problems. First, my initial hiring was for two part-time positions simultaneously at the same school. This was an odd bureaucratic situation where I was both a part-time special education teacher and a part time content area teacher for one year. So, for the new state, it didn't count. Second, because my initial certification and degree program were for a content area, my special education certificate was considered invalid in the new state. In GA all I had to do was take a test to add that cert to my original certificate. It's a low bar, so I can see why they'd say that's not good enough. Out of six years, 1 year was considered part time, 2 years were as a special ed teacher, and 3 as a content teacher. Only 3 years counted so I was not eligible for reciprocity.
It's nothing compared to higher-ed doctorate shit. You wouldn't believe the number of offices I had to pay for no reason. They didn't sit on my committee. They didn't review my work. They didn't manage my courses or degree program. Oh well, they each get $500 or you don't get your degree.
One big reason to worry about men falling behind is that the ones who do tend to become the voters who give us people like Trump.
I feel like a lot of pickup artists design their content around "hacks" to avoid standard wholesome solutions.
I'm having a hard time relating to this and recent posts about childhood education. When I was 3 my mother tried to put me in a pre-K school and I fled for the woods. At 5, I couldn't wait to go. Spending billions on pre-K sounds like parents today wanting free nanny care. The idea 5-yr old boys are too immature for school is equally nuts. Pushing kids ahead is also dumb. After second grade, my teacher said I should skip a grade. My Mom said screw off, and we left for Malaysia where she taught me for a year. A close childhood friend was similarly pushed a year ahead (also a boy); his parent said great; our child's a genius. He went to Harvard and has been in a mental institution since.
I guess I don’t understand the criticism here. “here are some problems that disparately impact group X and here are some nominally neutral solutions which would nonetheless particularly help group X” is a perfectly respectable book to write, whether it’s about race or gender or whatever. And I think the whys are important: you can’t just write your education policy book and declare that we need more voctec training or whatever without being intellectually curious enough to dig into the numbers and see who it would help.
Hi all lots of men here with ideas on teaching. I will say if you want to make a career switch subbing is not a bad way in. Try elementry school. Kinder is hard but i was surprised how much i like first grade.
I found 3rd-6th grade to be my favorite types of kids to supervise: old enough that they're able to do most things on their own, but young enough that they enjoy and want to do things with you.
Same upper elementry is fun!!
As the comedian Ron White observed, regarding Hurricanes, it's not that the wind blows it's what the wind blows.. Culture wars notwithstanding, when it comes to primary and secondary education the reverse is true. It's not what the student reads, it's that the student reads. To this end the ESL teachers I have known over the years, and that's just four, do not give a crap what engages their students. Comics, Manga, car mags, children's or YA literature, Harlequin romances did not matter. You can learn fundamental skills from any written work.
I would go somewhat farther than many perhaps when it comes to reading. Virtually anyone can learn to speed read, The techniques are quite mechanical but result in superior retention of content and the ability to absorb masses of material. Nothing teaches you to love reading more than the ability to read fast and well and to remember with clarity what you have read. The more you read the more you have to think about and ,most importantly, the more you can think about. Grist for the mill.
My wife has a sad story in this context of her father, a Phd mathematician and qualified actuary, had a midlife crisis and decided that teaching math in high school was he wanted to do. He got shredded in an urban public school with boys who had zero interest, and ended up going back to being an actuary (which definitely paid better). Obviously that is anecdotal, but i am sceptical "recruit more male teachers" is a practical answer. Maybe more community college and apprenticeship options so boys oncd grown up a bit get steered into adult education might be the way to go?
I'm an Actuary and we get so many career changers that are former High School Math teachers
My friend's wife just did that!
My sister did that too! Graduate -> Teach for America -> Actuary.
Yeah, that is consistent with my wife's story then.
I wonder do boys do better in single sex schools? I went to an all boys school, but i don't know if that is advantageous for boys. My mother was a teacher and definitely believed not having boys around was good for girls education, but i don't know if it works the other way.
Christ yes.
Another excellent newsletter, Matt! Many many years ago I was a Middle School teacher and was known as a “Specialist” in reading and Middle School. First and foremost I loudly applaud your call for a return to Phonics, especially for beginning readers!! Then we get into a myriad of ways boys fall behind and what might be done.
Boys are more frequently afflicted with ADHD and have problems with attention and behavior in a regular classroom. Girls, on the other hand, tend to be quieter and spend more time making their papers look clean & neat. For this they after get a big grade boost. Also girls social skills generally develop at a faster rate. For Middle School, the hormonal years, I would Hate to have older more developed boys in a class with 12-13 year old girls who think they are 25! However, we can do a much better job with boys in the earlier grades. We get reports about the success found from recruiting retired men to teach, particularly in elementary school. Both boys and girls can relate to a “Grandfather” type who likes kids. Because of Certifications some provision should be made so they can teach Public School. Perhaps retired men could work a first year as an Assistant Teacher and take their own class the next year.
Better Parent/School Relations need to begin with Workshop (Summer?) consisting of Teachers, Administrators and Parents. There needs to be agreement at the outset about expectations and costs. By that, IMHO, I mean a School Board should not have the final say about goals, outcomes and costs related to achieving desired outcomes. Putting a group of ADHD boys in a top level reading group with boys and girls with advanced reading skills is only going to result in the less-skilled ones disrupting class to slow it down and complaints about homework.
I could write about many other ways we can give boys incentives to become a teammate in their own learning, but I don’t want to be a bore. More pictures with words at every level, teach kids how to Read Math symbols and word questions, many more Voc/Ed Programs, welcome a wide variety of workers electricians, plumbers, etc. to tell classes how they got there as well as what they do. Today’s kids are not generally used to being told, “like it or lump it” or “You just need to try harder” or even “No one can do it for you…”. Change is possible but I think we need to directly address the fact that Teachers are not going to be able to address every individual need all day. While no one wants cruelty, there must again be some ways teachers can discipline students’ behavior. If an student has psychiatric problems, a place needs to be made for that student before making every state provide Pre-K or Nursery School even if the latter are good ideas.
SallyJones
As long as teachers are not paid what they are worth we will continue to have these problems in the education of our youth.
On Matt's last points I would like to volunteer my own services as a provider of "Wisdoms of the Ancients" by quoting The Hold Stead: "Guys go for looks, girls go for status." Full article here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UipHxGkcgEY
How does this jive with ~20 years of declining female labor force participation? We're basically the only major economy where that's been the case.
Be the subscription newsletterist you want to see in the world! Start a boys advice podcast!
Have you written about Jordan Peterson elsewhere? I don't quite know what to make of him.
He's a traditionalist intellectual and social media personality who believes lots of fairly banal, conservative-coded things (like what Matt wrote about), and some really weird things (I think he went on an all meat diet?), along with some things that could be construed as offensive in some quarters. Progressives hate him to an irrational degree, and his fanboys think he is more revolutionary and profound than he really is.
That's pretty much it.
On MY's last paragraph, there is a considerable strand of professional class progressives who follow the "success sequence" in their own lives but don't preach what they practice. They graduate high school, go to college, find a stable job, get married, and then have kids. But then they don't tell others that doing so is a good thing, and also say that less beneficial life choices of lower status people are good things. It's one thing for the peers of a working class male to reinforce their decisions to sleep around and smoke weed all day, but when higher status people (who this person wishes he was like) tell them that those are fine life choices, they really have no examples and reinforcement of more beneficial life choices.
I think you're aware, but just in case for anyone who is not, Matt addressed the success sequence in this article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/does-the-bush-era-poverty-cure-deserve
So today I listened to a podcast with Reeves as the guest. He brought up the "success sequence" and basically said the same thing MY does. He also added that the "new" marriage of professional class progressives is not the "old" type of marriage based on a male bread-winner that conservatives supposedly solely believe in, but instead is based more on equality. He said therefore conservatives don't know what they are asking for with respect to the success sequence. My response is I don't really care what philosophical reasons people use to justify getting married, having a two-parent household is better for kids. PMC progressives shouldn't be ashamed to say so, and more importantly, they shouldn't condone poor life choices of lower class people for social justice reasons.
I think MY and Reeves underestimate progressives' cultural power in regard to this. Yes, a single lawyer or software engineer or consultant doesn't have much cultural impact, but their kids who produce Youtube videos,Tik-Toks, Instagram posts, and work in TV, film, and journalism certainly do. Instilling in their kids the valuing of two-parent households would do a lot more to promote two-parent households than any government policy.
Also, on Matt's piece, I'm perfectly fine with widely available, inexpensive contraceptives. Make most oral contraceptives OTC. Heck, put condom dispensers in high school bathrooms and locker rooms.
This year, the community college I work at had an increase in the number and proportion of men earning a credential but when I looked deeper, I found it was due entirely to an increase in men earning short-term credentials, like welding and diesel repair.
(They were still a minority of graduates but not by as much.)
Also, men are underrepresented in online classes and this is well known in the literature but when I looked for reasons why, no one knows. I think this was a mostly problem during school shutdowns, but on the margin it means male students are less flexible in their course choices and may be less likely to attend college as a working adult. (Fully-online students tend to be older female students; traditional-age students often mix online and in-person classes, which I think lets them take more courses in a semester.)
As a man who considered at various times becoming a teacher, but ultimately didn't, I feel like I have an interesting perspective here.
To me, the main thing that stopped me wasn't money really (though probably that should have been enough) but the massive amounts of bullshit around teaching. I was not interested in going back to school for X years just to be a teacher, and despite being a smart guy with relevant degrees, there was no straightforward way to get some practical training and jump in. Aside from that, I heard a lot of horror stories at the amount of bullshit teachers are expected to just put up with. Bullshit from administrators, bullshit from school boards, bullshit from parents, and bullshit from regulators. It seemed like the primary skill leading to success for the modern educator was a willingness to tolerate massive amounts of bullshit.
My guess is that, in a patriarchal world, women are exposed to more bullshit on an everyday basis, and are therefore better equipped to deal with that bullshit. And also due to patriarchy, the bullshit gap between the education world and the regular world is probably less - not because they don't have to put up with education bullshit, but because they'd have to put up with a lot of bullshit anywhere else just for being a woman, and at least in education the bullshit is well-documented and applied equally to all.
A final piece is that I think that education leans towards stability over dynamism and flexibility. Going into education means you have a pretty structured way to go find a job, there's well-defined credentials you can pursue to advance upwards, and you can probably find work most places. This probably appeals temperamentally to young women more than it does to young men.
So overall, if you're a smart young guy with other good options and a preference for a more dynamic, less structured sort of environment, education is just a pretty terrible fit right now.
This is especially true for the schools pushing for more black men specifically. With so many large corporations make a big push to bring in more diveristy if you're a black man with a college degree you're going to have better options than teaching.
I once taught kids how to use computers at an after school organization as a bridge job immediately after college. I enjoyed it just fine, but a big reason I did is because I had very wide latitude on how I could teach since being there was a privilege and not an entitlement for the kids. When a few people asked me if I wanted to keep teaching, I said hell no, because I knew I did not want to deal with the bullshit that you precisely describe here.
Hell, even if you are a teacher, it's sometimes hard to get into the job. I taught for six years, moved to a new state and was told my certificate was no good. To get the right cert, I would have to go back to school for an undergrad or masters that included initial teacher certification. Wasn't going to do that again, so I enrolled in a doctorate instead.
To your point about getting practical training, it will be interesting in a few years to see how these alternative pathways have played out. Sure, we've had stuff like TFA and teacher residencies around for a few years, but they're small. It's only recently that entire states have opened up the teaching pool to, say, anyone who's a veteran of the armed forces.
I will add that stability was not a feature of teaching for me. Every year there were new directives, new curriculum, new tests, new administrators, and so on. While my job title didn't change, the bullshit did and it's the bullshit that makes the job feel unstable and unsustainable.
That's fair on the stability point. What I meant was really more like life path stability - it seems from what I've seen that teaching has an appeal for people who want to stay in one place, get married, and raise a family. But as you noted, even trying to move to another state screws everything up.
Each state controls licensure and each state can decide whether or not there is reciprocity with each other state's license.
In my case, the requirement in the new state was that I had taught continuously in the same position for 5 years and they'd accept my cert. Not necessarily at the same school but as, say, an English teacher in a school full-time. I ran into two problems. First, my initial hiring was for two part-time positions simultaneously at the same school. This was an odd bureaucratic situation where I was both a part-time special education teacher and a part time content area teacher for one year. So, for the new state, it didn't count. Second, because my initial certification and degree program were for a content area, my special education certificate was considered invalid in the new state. In GA all I had to do was take a test to add that cert to my original certificate. It's a low bar, so I can see why they'd say that's not good enough. Out of six years, 1 year was considered part time, 2 years were as a special ed teacher, and 3 as a content teacher. Only 3 years counted so I was not eligible for reciprocity.
It's nothing compared to higher-ed doctorate shit. You wouldn't believe the number of offices I had to pay for no reason. They didn't sit on my committee. They didn't review my work. They didn't manage my courses or degree program. Oh well, they each get $500 or you don't get your degree.