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The few. The proud. The male teachers.

Their numbers are declining. And for some elementary kids, they offer a kind of role model unavailable elsewhere.

By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK
Published January 12, 2007

Bryant Elementary first-grade teacher Nick Holtvluwer teases Urvi Upadhyaya as she heads off to wash having cream from her hands. Holtvluwer had students smear shaving cream on their desktops and then write in it with their fingers to spell words during a spelling quiz.
	[Times photos: Mike Pease]

ADVERTISEMENT This sign hangs in Holtvluwer's classroom. He likes to keep his students involved with lots of humor, physical activities and one-on-one questions and conversations.

Nick Holtvluwer looks like a Marine, or maybe a cop — six-foot-one, shaved head, trim, former-football-player physique.

He doesn’t intimidate his class of 6- and 7-year-olds one bit.

They clamor for his attention as they learn first-grade geometry with toothpicks and marshmallows. “Mr. H.! I’m making a real-world shape!” “Mr. H.! Look!”

Holtvluwer circles the Bryant Elementary School classroom, giving each of his students some face time, whether it’s praise, help or just random silliness.

He uses words like “very cool” and, more than just rules, he has his “number one big-time fancy-banana good-time rock and rolling rule,” which basically is that you can do what you want so long as you don’t bother anyone else.
One girl pretends to eat her marshmallows, which Holtvluwer tells his class is just a fancy word for vertices. “Not now!” he shouts in mock horror, breaking into a grin. “You can’t eat math yet!”

“Ever since growing up, I’ve always been able to relate to kids,” says Holtvluwer, 31, during his brief lunch break. “I still think I’m 13 years old myself. I’m still a kid at heart, and that’s how I run my classroom.”

Principal Karen Bass loves having Holtvluwer around, and not just for his boundless energy and his great teaching. She also likes that he is a he.

“You need to have both (men and women) on your staff in order to provide role models on your staff,” Bass says. Children should see “teaching and learning are experiences that everyone has.”

It’s no easy task to get there. The percentage of males in teaching has hit a 40-year low, the National Education Association reports, at slightly fewer than one of every four teachers in U.S. public schools. Florida logs in lower than the national level, and Hillsborough County below that. The state ranks Hillsborough 64th of 67 counties when it comes to the percentage of men in the classroom.

The vast majority of them teach in middle and high schools. Elementary schools, which serve 47 percent of the school district’s students, employ just 21 percent of the county’s male teachers. Twenty-four of the 130 elementary schools have just one or two.

There is little to no hard evidence that this affects student achievement. Male teachers can be just as good, or as bad, as their female counterparts.

Still, there remains a general sense in some corners that kids should be exposed to both genders as teachers.

“I just think it makes a big difference when there is a father in the home and a male in the classroom, for some of the students,” says Lewis Brinson, assistant superintendent for administration. “Some boys respond better to males than females. Some boys don’t see men until they get to school.”

Not that Hillsborough County or the state of Florida make special efforts to find male teachers.

“We look for the best teachers, and we beg for the men,” Brinson says. “When we see men in our line, we basically hope they are good candidates.”

The steadily dropping percentage of male teachers unsettles many experts, who see the trend as a signal that teaching holds little esteem as a profession.

Culturally, men are expected to support their families and be respected in the community. Teaching offers neither the high pay nor the high profile.

When it comes to elementary school, considered by many the “nurturing years,” the prospects for attracting men are even lower. The perception among many in society is that there’s something wrong with a man who wants to work with small children.

Some of the same issues that repel men have the same effect on women, whose job options are vastly broader than 50 years ago, when teaching and nursing were the two main professions for women.

“To me, it always gets back to if we could just improve the quality of the job, then all of these things would start to dry up,” says University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Ingersoll, a leader in the study of the teaching profession. “If it was really attractive, there wouldn’t be, probably, a decrease in males going into it.”

Holtvluwer didn’t start out as a teacher. His first career was in television production. But Grand Rapids, Mich., didn’t offer much in that field — especially in children’s programming — so he turned to the classroom instead.

Even then, Holtvluwer had no intention of teaching the youngest children.

“It was part of the stigma. Would I be able to relate to the first grades? I didn’t know,” he says.

An internship with a male first-grade teacher changed his view: “That’s when I realized first grade is not just babysitting,” he says.

Here, at least, it’s more like learning without realizing it, with a teacher who seems most like Tom Hanks’ character Josh from the movie Big.

Holtvluwer shouts “goose egg’’ at the last kid to find a seat. He juggles. He dances. He plays with Frank, the monkey puppet who hangs from the ceiling, and a green blow-up character the kids call Alien H.

Kids practice spelling in a mound of shaving cream on their desks. They earn super cents for making super shots with a foam basketball if they get their name on the board for good behavior. The super cents are good for toys they can choose from the super bowl once each month.

It’s an idea Holtvluwer devised to combine discipline, math, economics and Chuck E. Cheese.

“The kids all love him,” says Sandy Coleman, whose son Ryan is in the class.

Why?

“He teaches everything, and he does funny things,” first-grader Abhi Kandukuru says. “He acts great.”

Does it matter that he’s a male teacher? Abhi thinks it’s good: “I never had a boy teacher,” the 6-year-old says.

Coleman thinks the quality of teaching matters more, though she adds that having men around can’t hurt. “I always think that male figures in a child’s life are important, because they usually only have their fathers or a coach,” she says.

Chan Bliss, one of Bryant’s first male teachers (the school currently has nine), says the job has its pitfalls as well as its benefits. On the downside, he recalls feeling on the outside as the only man at a different Hillsborough elementary school. “I don’t think they even had a men’s bathroom,” Bliss recalls. He laughs.

But it’s also fun, he adds. “When you’re teaching elementary school, they really think of you as a god,” Bliss says.

“I was just told today I was the greatest art teacher (a boy student) had ever had. Granted, he was in first grade. You take it where you can.”

Holtvluwer says he still gets funny looks when he tells people about his chosen profession, or when they see him buying loads of kid things at Publix or Target.

“That’s okay with me. I’m proud of it,” he says. “Could I have a better job? Yeah, I probably could. But would I be as happy?”

Watching his class, there’s no need to answer.

Jeffrey S. Solochek can be reached at solochek@sptimes.com or (813) 269-5304.

[Last modified January 11, 2007, 15:53:58]