I spent Thursday night at 9pm glued to BBC2 watching their School season, more specifically Gareth Malone’s Extraordinary School for Boys.
It highlighted what is a real worry for me the feminising of teaching and the lack of male teachers in our primary schools. According to a recent piece in the telegraph am only make up 12% of of the teachers in primary schools.
As a mum of two boys I find this a worry statistics and would love for my boys to go to a primary school where the teaching mix was much more appropriate to the society we live in.
We are lucky in the Maxi has a Male teacher for Year 1 and also had a male teacher in Preschool, but there are no more male teachers at the school and there are no male teaching assistants at all.
Why are male teachers important?
I often though that the reason boys and girls were different was due to their upbringing, but being a mum to two boys has been a real eye opener for me. I realise that they are completely wired differently and need different things to girls and I feel that we need to take this in to account when teaching them.
Boys need positive make role models, they need to be able to let off steam. They need their differences to be embraced, but to be made to learn like girls.
Anyway back to the programme, what struck me so much was that they boys were really engaged, they interacted to Gareth and they were happy. They were not stuck in some apathetic state.
I spent some time on twitter too and it was amazing the number of people who all agree that we need more male primary school teachers and that boys need a different approach to girls.
I am so looking forward to the rest of the program on Thursday.
