Male Teachers mean everything to male students...a mini bio!

There is an irony that may not be obvious to some, about the process males go through to learn. For all the talk about the absence of emotions, and the absence of compassion and empathy in males, it is precisely the trait of "connecting" with a teacher that can be counted on to stimulate and to motivate a male child to learn.
Male children watch their male role models with intense scrutiny, examining their shoes, the way they tie their ties, the way they comb their hair, their walk including its 'swagger' or its bent shoulders, the way they hold their finger at their lip when they speak, especially when they are at the front of the class.
Men who are curious, and ask a lot of questions will generate profound (if unrevealed) admiration among their male students or players on a sports team. That admiration may alsoreveal itself in good-natured dissing of the very quality they admire most, the penetrating curiousity of the male mentor, teacher, coach.
Having experience female teachers from grade one through six, I confronted my first male teacher in grade seven and only months ago, while purchasing gas in that same town, I ran into him at the pump, after fifty years, for the very first time. And we reminisced about the trip he and another male teacher organized to Toronto's Royal Winter Fair, to Simpson's restaurant, to the gaping hole of the under-construction subway, around which the Toronto Telegram photographer took the picture of all 91 of us, who have travelled all night, by train for the adventure.
And every other male teacher is fully inscribed in my memory in a similar manner, indellibly. The grade nine history and english teacher, who later transferred to Phys. Ed. and became a highly successful basketball coach, who deeply humbled me the night before he died, by requesting that I brush his hair, while visiting with another of his students, from a different era in his career. The grade nine and ten math teacher whose suits, hair and shoes were, in a word, impeccable, as was his command of his subject, and of his classroom. Everyone there will never forget the moment he had had enough of public address announcements invading his classroom, through the speaker mounted high on the side wall, above the blackboard. Although a mere 5'7", in climbed on his chair, reached his arms as high as he could and ripped the box from the wall, smiling surreptitiously, with the words, "That should keep them quiet for a little while!"
The grade eleven physics teacher who, while returning the Christmas exam papers, commented ever so quietly, without causing embarrassment to me as he handed me a mark of 74, "When are you going to start to work?" When he returned the Easter papers, he uttered not a word, only smiled, as he passed me the 87. You see, he had struck a note, by ever-so-slightly embarrassing me, privately. "I'll show him, I pondered for the next several months, whenever there was a physics experiment, test or exam to get ready for.
And there were the grade eleven, twelve and thirteen English teachers, all male, and so different as to make a veritable cast of a play...the first a thespian, in Hardy Amies suits, a six-foot-four wacy blonde haired elocutionist who not know knew his literature and his composition, but enjoyed every minute of every classes' attention and growth; the second (grade twelve) a house-mate of the first, a rumpled five-foot-seven or eight, half bald, with a smile as wide as the St. Lawrence, and eyes that danced from student to student, flirting momentarily with the sight of a bird landing on the limb just outside the classroom, at which moment, he would stop his examination of the Shakespearean play of the day, and utter his amazement at the sight and musical lyricism of the bird. And the third, a six-foot-two former military officer, who spoke in clipped words, phrases and telegraphic sentences, as his prepared his charges for their departmental examinations.
It was a cosmic gift to have spent so much time with those men, all of them, because they informed my gestalt of what it means to be a male. I did not even know the word "gay" in 1959 when I left high school and wandered the campus of Western, in London.

And there I was blessed, once again, by another English scholar, a protege of Northrup Frye, having completed his doctorate by the age of twenty-four, on Virginia Woolf.  His name, John Wichello Graham, originally from Winnipeg, son of another university professor, who, because of a birth defect that left his one arm permanently bent, was unable to engage in the sports of his heart's desire, turned instead to books, to literature and to a life of teaching at the university. He, boldly and bravely, rejected the "publish or perish" mantra that hung around so many of his peers' necks, insisting instead, that this full attention be dedicated to his students, his lectures and his shepherding of those students, of which I am proud to say I was one.