Male teachers: an endangered species?

"Mrs. Stewart, can you read this for me?" a second-grader at Mount Loafer Elementary School in Salem asks.

Another student in the class quickly corrects him, "It's Ms. Stewart, he's not married."

Actually, it's Mister.

Kyle Stewart, a Brigham Young University student preparing to take on his own fifth-grade classroom next fall, is one of few male college students preparing to enter the work force as an elementary school teacher, a profession that continues to struggle against the stereotype that teaching is women's work.

Despite male teachers' convictions that men in the classroom bring a much-needed male role model and masculine identity to the classroom, the National Education Association reports that the number of male elementary school teachers nationwide remains at a mere 14.7 percent of all teachers.

Utah also turns up low numbers each year, with the most recent data showing male K-6 teachers occupying only 12.4 percent of licensed teaching positions throughout the state.

Jim Birrell, who taught elementary school for 10 years and now instructs elementary education students at BYU, said schools and parents need to be concerned about the low numbers because they deprive many schools of the benefits that come from the male perspective on life and on teaching.

"When you consider how fatherless so much of America is, many young boys today don't have a decent male in their life," Birrell said. "I'm not so sure many of these boys understand what it means, historically, to be a man."

This "meaning of maleness" that male teachers bring to a classroom is crucial to the development of elementary-age boys, Birrell continued.

Moreover, Birrell said a school should function much like a family, with a man and a woman both equally in charge of developing the children, thus demonstrating how males and females can effectively work together in society.

Stewart, who is part of a feeble 2 to 3 percent of male students in the elementary education program at BYU, said men sometimes have better control of their classrooms because boys know how to manipulate women in ways they would not dare try with men.

"Maybe it's because men demand more respect, maybe the boys see their fathers as the disciplinarians, or maybe it's just because men are an oddity and kids don't know how they will react," Stewart said.