Male vs female teachers

Posted by teacher on February 8, 2010

Doing a specific action oneself is something entirely different from having to make another person execute that task. The same is the case with teachers, required to accomplish the comprehensive job of equipping their pupils with academic advancement and character building.

In order to achieve the set goals, a teacher needs to have a versatile personality that can help him/her manage various situations while performing his/her professional job. The male-female comparison in many fields of life at numerous platforms has been one of the most contentious subjects related to human interest in recent times. And a relative evaluation in the case of teaching, featuring male and female teachers, can be made, too.

The purpose of this comparison is to attempt to arrive at a concrete conclusion as to who can be more appropriate for teaching (men or women?) while keeping an eye on the positive aspects of both as teachers. Setting a particular set of criterion for this sensitive assessment while putting male educators up for comparison with their female counterparts can be very complex. Furthermore, a relative evaluation while considering all levels of the teaching institution — pre-primary, secondary schools, colleges and universities — that include teachers as well as students of various age groups, can become a complicated job. Urban and rural setups too have their own eccentricities.

Without a trace of doubt, the first and foremost quality of a good teacher is his or her morality. Although morality is important for every human being, it is a prerequisite for the providers of education. As regards male and female teachers, one determines that this spirit of morality can differ from person to person. It is not gender-related.

The second vital pillar elevating a teacher above the rest is the accurate knowledge of his/her subject, without which the mere foundation of teaching would remain fragile. But one would agree that in the current period of access to information, both genders in the teaching profession — depending on their respective levels of awareness — must possess this characteristic.

However, it was quite interesting to be informed by several university students — who, on being asked who they thought were the better teachers — that men, due to their better knowledge and exposure, had proven themselves as more prolific than their women colleagues.

The higher level of knowledge held by the men, the students opined, was due to the comparatively wider exposure they get in our society, mainly because of the fact that they remain more mobile than the women.

One girl student was of the view that the women teachers at her university lacked researching their subjects and were therefore restricted to the course outline. Whereas the men, she added, had a far more professional approach. She was backed in her opinion by another university student, also female, who while insisting that the men held finer influence as teachers, also stressed that several of their women educators, unlike the men, did not have up-to-date knowledge of their subject.

Teaching without comprehensive knowledge is not creatively effective. And it was no surprise when one more girl from a renowned college, emphasised that the explanation mode of their male lecturers was clearer than the females’. One then has no hesitation in revealing that several university students on being approached to speak on the contentious subject responded by pointing out that their female teachers did not encourage the students to come up with fresh ideas while stating that the case was different with men.