After retiring from my 30-year career in city planning, I decided to volunteer at an after-school tutoring center in San Francisco’s Mission District. I’d been helping students with homework almost my entire life; I’m the father of two adult children, an older brother to five siblings, and throughout my teens, I was a Special-Ed tutor, a babysitter and a lifeguard. I helped dozens of high-school friends with their homework. I felt I could handle this.
It did not seem daunting that the center serves the neighborhood’s primarily Latin-American immigrant families. As a city planner, I’d spent many hours working in the Mission and had acted as a translator and facilitator. I grew up in the public schools of San Jose’s East Side, the center of the city’s immigrant Mexican-American community. My Spanish is rudimentary but serviceable. My own parents were themselves children of immigrants from non-English-speaking (French-Canadian, Slavic) homes.
Yes, I figured I was prepared for the task of tutoring.
I didn’t expect how hands would shoot up the minute I walked in the door. I didn’t anticipate how students (mostly boys, between third and eighth grade) would shout out for me to work with them, nor how they would break from writing or math problems to tell me about their day at school, their life at home, their favorite NBA player, their favorite rapper, their video games, their new shoes, their dread of middle school, their battles with the school bully.
I turned out to be even better prepared for tutoring than I would’ve guessed. I’m pretty sure, all things considered, that is because I am a man.
Which necessarily means that I was once a boy myself. Clearly, I had some background to offer empathy, but this went beyond that. After my students would spend a few minutes vetting their anxieties with me—testing the waters, perhaps—they’d ask me questions: did I ever get bullied? How old are my kids? How much money did I make in my job? What’s “city planning” mean, anyway?
In the January 30, 2023, New Yorker, in a piece titled “What’s the Matter with Men?” Idrees Kahloon, the Washington Bureau Chief for The Economist, describes the struggles of boys and young men. “Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise,” he notes. “In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. […]Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide.”
The rapidity of this crisis is as alarming as the severity, Kahloon notes, citing Richard V. Reeves, Brookings Institute senior fellow and author of “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It” (2022)”: “’As far as I can tell,’ Reeves writes, ‘nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively.'”
Kahloon points to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study tracking American men who were neither at school or work: “Most of these hours of free time are spent watching screens rather than doing household labor or caring for family members. Instead of socializing more, men without work are even less involved in their communities than those with jobs. The available data suggest that their lot is not a happy one.”
The data, Kahloon suggests, also help explain why American men are drawn to the new brand of reactionary politics “premised on a return to better times, when America was great—and, unsubtly, when men could really be men. […]The vintage machismo that Donald Trump so prizes may explain why the gender gap in the popular opinion of him was so large. How men are faring in school and at work may not arouse everyone’s concern, but how men choose to pursue politics inevitably affects us all.”
Apathy is the real danger, warns Ioakim Boutakidis, a California State University Fullerton Professor of Child and Adolescent Studies. “At many universities, the most salient characteristic of the people struggling the most is that they identify as males,” he wrote to the New Yorker in response to Kahloon. “It’s taken an unfortunate amount of work to get people, even in my highly educated circle, to recognize the issue. I understand the resistance, which is often based on a genuine ignorance of the problem, political sensibilities, or even the feeling that this is somehow the just deserts of our culture’s misogyny. But, once I paint a picture of what society could look like when an ever-higher percentage of men are undereducated, underemployed, and looking for someone to blame, most people appreciate that this is an outcome we should strive to avoid.”
I see Boutakidis’ warning as cautionary, not pessimistic. Even Kahloon ends his article on this semi-promising note: “Masculinity is fragile; it’s also malleable. The shapes it will assume in the future have consequences.” However, I find more optimism in the words of journalist/activist Gloria Steinem. In her book “The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off,” she writes: “Men can be just as loving and nurturing as women–it’s a libel on men to say they can’t–but we all learn by example. Boys just need nurturing men in their lives so they know it’s okay for them to be nurturing.”
In her 2015 speech at the International Conference on Masculinities, in New York, Steinem makes a compelling pitch for feminism: “Men have been lonely without partners who share interests[…]. They were being told essentially to marry housekeepers with whom they may or may not share interests, and their lives became instantly different in the home and outside the home. Men’s life expectancy increases by three to four years if you deduct from all the reasons that men die that could be reasonably attributed to the masculine role. Death from violence, death from speeding, from tension-related diseases. What other movement can offer men three or four more years? It’s not a bad offer!”
Indeed. As I worked closely with boys who clearly looked up to me, who craved my attention and approval, I realized I was being scrutinized by them. And I recognized that this version of a male role model that I am necessarily assuming has real traction. One of my first students, back in 2017, was an eighth grader named Antonio. He is the eldest of four boys, and the younger three couldn’t be more different: they are loud, funny and excitable, whereas I’d never heard Antonio speak in anything but a whisper. When the after-school center staff assigned him to me, they noted his reading level was below grade level, and his grades were suffering overall, they feared, because he was so extraordinarily shy.
We decided the best method of helping Antonio with his homework would be for me to work with him one-on-one in a quiet setting, not in the main room filled with noise (especially generated by his brothers Jose, Ricky and Ben, all of whom I’d also tutored). We chose a spot in the back room behind the staff’s desks. Antonio was to read aloud from his book for thirty-five minutes, and I was to sit and listen. If there was a word I guessed he didn’t understand, I was to stop and ask him.
This could be tricky: he read aloud slowly and so very quietly that interrupting him seemed like an invasion. When I did ask about a word he didn’t understand, I’d repeat it, write its definition on a Post-It and then let him resume. I didn’t ever challenge him on words he pretended to know. I figured there was something of his dignity at stake. This soon paid off when, after a few weeks, he began to pause expectantly with a strange word, inviting me to ask.
I also noticed that his voice volume increased perceptibly, as if he were stepping onto thin ice and finding it thick enough to support us both. At the end of each session, we’d have a half-dozen words on a Post-It. I’d review them quickly, thank him, and he’d be on his way.
Over the next two months, I began to ask a few questions not related to his reading–Does it ever get crazy at home, sometimes, with your goofy, funny brothers?–and he’d blush, nod, smile.
At the end of the semester, his voice was more assertive, his flow smoother, and his grades in everything from English to math to science improved. I could not wait to share my enthusiasm in broken Spanish with his mother, who’d come at the end of each session to walk all five of her boys home. I’d make a point of turning to Antonio to ask if I hadn’t mangled Spanish too badly. He’d shake his head and smile politely, both of us appreciating his proficiency in this realm over mine.
Two years later, Antonio was an academically-thriving sophomore in high school. He didn’t come to the center for tutoring help anymore. Instead, he was there to do his homework while his brothers were tutored; then he’d walk them home himself.
The next year, he was a junior. I saw him seated at the tables where young students were reading from their books and struggling with multiplication tables. Antonio was watching Yolanda, a third-grader, write each one of her vocabulary words ten times.
“Antonio…” I gaped. “Are you a tutor now?”
He blushed and smiled, and we both watched Yolanda erase a misspelling. This tutoring center, which is overwhelmingly staffed by women, is hiring more staff. I imagine they’d be thrilled to have young men like Antonio on their payroll. I imagine this gender disparity is also an opportunity that plays out in cities across America.
I couldn’t stop my brain from spinning. It dawns on me that I’m offering a role model for Antonio (and for Jose, Ricky, Ben and Yolanda) that is more accessible, more relevant on a day-to-day basis, than any rapper or NBA star. I realize that it certainly helps that I can listen to talk about J. Cole or Steph Curry, but more resoundingly, it helps that I am a man, and that I am there. And if that adds three or four more years to my life, it truly is a good offer.
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Peter Albert
Thank you Peter Albert! Your story is wonderful. You are doing a job so seriously needed all across our country.
Once upon a time, I had the privilege of being invited to help in my older daughter’s classroom—with reading. It was because my child was an avid reader ( first grade). I was assigned a special case, a child I felt to be troubled. Each time there was a breakthrough, I cheered her on and hugged her so big! Can’t do that anymore. The secret was my kids and I read together for fun.
I’m cheering you on Peter. Aunt Darby