<p>It's been my boys' experience that some female teachers have become too "touchy feely" with their assignments and that gives girls an advantage and turns off boys. Or, their assignments are too "artsy" (make a poster, etc) which also more appeals to girls. When confronted about the assignments, these teachers either "blow you off" or get defensive.</p>
<p>When I stop to think about it, my kids had only one male teacher in elementary (PE), averaged 2 male teachers in 2 years in middle school, and other than PE no male teachers in high school. Wow, I really hadn't realized how underrepresented males are in education here.</p>
<p>That hasn't been true for me at all.</p>
<p>Actually, the more 'artsy' teachers I've had were all male.</p>
<p>Really each teacher is different. I live in the UAE and for actually I usually had male teachers! Honestly speaking though what matters more is the teacher themselves. However I did have a few male teachers who would quite openly favor girls over guys. That really got on my nerves (in 6 grade little girls look sooo much more innocent than boys)</p>
<p>In sixth grade girls are much more innocent than boys. :-P</p>
<p>Yeah well maybe that's true but not all of them. Some were devils disguised as angels!</p>
<p>There are only two kinds of teachers: good and bad.
Personally, I am rather an oddity: a female physics prof, and can tell you out of experience: my male students jump out of their skins trying to perform their best to show me how smart they are.
I have to agree with one thing though: I am pretty sure that I make my female students more comfortable: if she can do it, so can I.</p>
<p>My kids have had a LOT more male teachers in private school than they had in public school. I'm glad they have mostly excellent teachers & believe it is helpful for them to have some male & some female teachers. I have had teachers with blatant gender bias, as I'm sure everyone else has, but that seems to be part of life. Sorry to hear about that one horrible teacher your child had, but glad your D has moved on.</p>
<p>fizik - that rings very true to me. </p>
<p>I recently took an advanced-level science class at college, and for the first time in my life, very seriously wondered whether or not I could "handle" the intellectual rigors of the harder sciences.</p>
<p>And you might not think so if you have not encountered this yourselves, but it really helped that the teaching assistant for that class was a young black female who had just successfully defended her PhD. "Hey, if she could do all this, maybe I can too!"</p>
<p>My D's favorite elementary teacher was male; her least favorite was female.
In middle school, with many more teachers, there were male & female in each category. In high school, there were male & female in each category. In college...well, she has both male & female faves and hasn't had any that she really disliked. No apparent pattern. A datum.</p>