You see it all the time, a male teacher is arrested for doing something absolutely disturbing, or he molested students in the bathroom, Or when a teacher has sexual relationship with a student. These grotesque cases are only two of the many, many, many cases you can find online. You want to know something sick? The ones you find are the only the ones that have been taken to court; that means some of the cases don’t even make it to court, or even worse, they aren’t even reported.
When one person does something so disturbing in my future career, it makes it that much harder for good educators to get jobs. It makes the interviewing process that much more microscopic. It's why my social media has been clean for the past three years, it's why I don’t party, it's why a picture of me with a red solo cup is a career killer. Educators are put under a microscope, this microscope is open to the public (you can literally look up educator’s salary). I have had mentors tell me if they would hire me or not just based off my social media content.
I have a bone to pick with the men who decide to become an educator to fulfill some sick satisfaction. First of all, how dare you. You think that the well-being of students is a game? You think that these students know any better? Do you actually think that those children wanted to have sex with you? For some sick reason, they adore you, and you took advantage of that. You are a monster.
When a teacher forces sex on a student, it is a vagrant misuse of power. A student trusts you with everything, you are basically a parental figure in their eyes, and actually, you are the substitute parent. With the article mentioned above, the students reported that something was happening, but that is not always the case. Students feel like they can’t say anything, if they do they could “ruin someone’s life” as in the teacher. That’s called guilt shaming.
That is not the only stigma against male educators, but it is the worst. There is also the fact that being an educator is considered an emasculate, as in it’s not meant to be a job for a man. Think about it, when I say teacher, what gender do you think of? What about chef and server? Or doctor and nurse? We have assigned these genders on positions because why, one is better than the other? But, I digress, that’s a whole book in itself.
Education is bias, it’s if two people, a man and a woman, with the same qualifications, the same college, the same experiences, and the man will be hired because there is a “push” for male educators. I'm sorry, but that’s ridiculous, I want to know that I actually earned my position, not just to be more diverse.
Education always gets a bad label, but if we stick together and push out the awful monsters who harass students, we can start changing that label, together.
