There was quite the ruckus last week when a presenter on a BBC education programme introduced himself as a teacher who wasn’t like ”the grumpy physics teacher with a faint aroma of cabbage who you’re a little bit scared of”. Quite rightly, a plethora of non-cabbagey-scented science teachers tweeted in to suggest their licence fee demand be clamped over a lit Bunsen burner.

What not enough people complained about was the fact that this obviously ill-at-ease and lightweight TV pedagogue actually dared to describe himself as “laid-back” and “the cool one”.

Oh dear. 

If he’d had a classroom full of learners in front of him at that moment, instead of a socially distanced cameraman and a production assistant fumbling cue cards, he would have experienced a bunch of 14-year-olds side-eyeing one another in collective embarrassment, before proceeding to rip him to shreds.

Describing yourself as “cool”, as every student knows, is cringe factor 10.

Teachers don’t get to decide if we’re cool in the classroom

Let’s be clear about this. We don’t get to decide if we’re the cool ones, just as we can’t declare ourselves beautiful, intelligent or gifted without sounding arrogant, graceless and deluded. You have to prove yourself first, and the chances are that if you think you’re cool, your pupils don’t (not that they’d even use that word, right?). 

Many years ago, during a PGCE placement, I was unlucky enough to have a mentor with all the grace and charm of David Brent. He was a man of middle age who’d somehow been given the Wednesday afternoon responsibility of tutoring the newbies in various aspects of school life. 

His belief in his own comic abilities was painful. At our first encounter, he stood before us and pointed wryly to his extremely loud tie, before announcing, “I think this says all you’ll need to know about me.” 

Thereafter, after cracking jokes that we laughed at only out of fear, he would point over and over again to his tie, as though declaring “What am I like?” in lieu of actual punchlines. I won’t tell you the nickname the students had for him, but it was one syllable-long and very rude. And it certainly wasn’t “cool”. 

On my last day at the school, I went to see him, feeling obliged to thank him for his Wednesday afternoon sessions. I found him mid-lesson, his class openly mocking him. The worst part was, he genuinely seemed to think their misbehaviour was “banter”.

Building an honest rapport

You can probably think back to your own school days and the teachers you believed to be cool. I’m willing to bet that they were well-respected not because they declared themselves so, but because they enabled learning to take place and knew their stuff, inspiring a life-long love of the subject.

Opening a lesson with “I’m cool” only goes to show pupils that the fool before them is clueless about their own standing in the universe.

There’s a popular teacher at my school, whom I shall refer to as Elektra. I don’t know why. It’s a cool name.

Elektra is loved by a lot of her students. She’s firm but fair, and almost intimidatingly open and honest. She possesses years of experience in the classroom and, most importantly, is neither bendable nor a bully. She knows how to relate her curriculum to real life, making herself available to students whenever they need her. And she loves the subject she teaches. 

This isn’t a costume Elektra throws on when she enters the classroom, either; in the staffroom, she’s equally personable and fun to be around. She doesn’t smell of cabbage.

If a teacher is trying to impress children to make themselves feel more popular, rather than building an honest rapport with the students, they’ll isolate themselves pretty quickly, and not just with their classes. Other teachers will likely call out their immaturity before too long. 

It’s noteworthy that no one has talked about the actual learning content of the BBC Bitesize video that caused so much controversy, with all the focus being on the insult to other teachers. If a teacher’s schtick is all about them, the teaching will inevitably suffer, no matter how loud their tie is. 

Paul Read is a teacher and writer