Baraita: November 2004 Archives

This post, over at Baraita made my day. I’ve long past given up even thinking about being the Cool Teacher (I’ve made it to “scary prof” way before my time), but this certainly reminded me of past hopes:

Let me confess something: I have always wanted to be a Cool Teacher. You know the Cool Teachers: they are descended from Indiana Jones out of Ms. Frizzle.* They ride motorcycles to class, get interviewed on the news, and wear fascinating tribal jewelry given them by their adopted Exotic Ethnicity family. Their classes transform their students’ lives: forever after, you will remember the day the Cool Teacher breezed into class, unsnapping his bike helmet to reveal a casually elegant head of attractively silvered hair, and announced that he’d cancelled the test in favor of a field trip involving a charter jet, ancient ruins, and at least one mysterious ex-lover.

It strikes me that you probably have to (a) -teach in the humanities-, (b) have tenure, and ==(c)== not have tenure (or not care about it), for this to work.

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3 Comments

  1. Posted 11/17/2004 at 10:45 am | Permalink

    Actually, the minute I posted this, I realized that (a) may not be the case. There are certainly Cool Teachers in the hard sciences–especially physics, geology, and astronomy. And quite a few in the social sciences. So, let’s strike (a).

  2. Swampthing
    Posted 11/17/2004 at 3:23 pm | Permalink

    I would consider anyone who can teach us to scrape, er, … uh, I mean “analyze” websites to be at the very least “approaching cool.” Maybe by teaching the cyberporn class you will be promoted to “way cool.”

  3. Barbara
    Posted 11/17/2004 at 4:25 pm | Permalink

    Well, you could get some puka shells and a mumu.

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