If you're looking for live mantids in the classroom, check out www.carolina.com (or specifically https://www2.carolina.com/webapp/wcs/stores...=&crumbs=n)
There are plenty of fantastic baubles to oogle at there!
A male would have to fertilize the eggs in order to produce males. This is the reason:
Females have two X chromosomes ("XX") while males have an X and a Y ("XY"). When a female produces asexually, it is like she is fertilizing her own eggs with her own DNA, so getting a Y chromosome would be...
Not every mantis can hear, and they have a relatively simple ear (just a membrane that is sensitive to certain frequencies of vibration). I think there's a positive correlation between how well a species can fly and how well it can hear, but I'm not certain.
Persistance might help when hand feeding...especially if she's not used to eating that way. They can be skeptical of already dead food...especially when it is being held by a huge creature from their perspective.
Fruit flies are waay to small to be bait for anything I think. You can, however, catch your own in the spring. Leave some fruit out (a sliced orange will do) and you'll get plenty of them (and plenty other bugs besides).
No males of the species Brunneria borealis are known to exist in captivity. The ooths that the females lay will hatch without being fertalized by a male. I believe that they can be found in the southern/western US.
You might also try hand feeding her. Decapitate a cricket or something and put it up to her mandibles with a pair of tweezers. She'll probably taste it and grab on to munch.
In the book The Praying Mantis, they have a neat section on mantis hearing. They also have an interesting experiment regarding in-flight reactions to sounds heard. The experimenters conjectured that the reason they hear sound at such high frequency is so that they can hear bats using...
So for a culture, I seem to be getting the sense that this is the kind of setup needed:
A glass jar/tank (I've read they can't climb glass). Put some paper/paper towels in the bottom as substrate. I've read that flaked fish food works for feeding. A heat lamp to keep the temperature around...