Harnessing the Cringe

At risk of sounding like the nine year olds I teach, when (if?) I grow up I wanna be a YouTuber.

Through a series of happy accidents I’ve found myself in my mid-thirties as a specialist mythology teacher, still wading knee-deep in the odd social cultures of the kids that learn with me - the Italian brain rot, the rizz, all of that.

I teach myths all the time, and I think in myths when I’m not teaching. Each year, I teach The Iliad to 700+ ten-year-olds in East London.

Over the last four years, I’ve taught myths to over a thousand kids around the world on Outschool.

It’s a strange old gig. I’ve found a professional niche where surrealism is standard, where nonsense is the norm.

Heck, I spent a year in my garden shed in lockdown pretending to be my own Polite Receptionist, gatekeeping access to my sacred knowledge.

Whimsy feels like home.

But… what does career progression look like for a person who is paid to pretend to be a newborn god over Zoom to make kids in Minnesota laugh?

Substack - my minuscule audience of sixty known and unknown people - you are going to be the first to witness my tentative steps into becoming ahem A Successful Educational YouTuber.

Over the next year, my plan is to build a channel of Mythology stuff that kids are so entertained, allured and/or mortified by that they learn a lot without realising.

I want to smuggle my interests in myth, legend, psychology, Jung, anthropology and archaeology (why not?) into YouTube content that fascinates 9-13 year olds through the force of edutainment.

This is not the comfort zone. I’m happy and confident teaching the real small people - in person or online - but ‘teaching into the lens’ is not something I’ve done a lot of.

I am pulling together what I’ve learned from fifteen years of teaching, and especially from every weird conversation I get pulled into.

When I teach online, I’m usually the only British person in the room. Myth has a global audience but online teaching has taught me that in the English-speaking world, Greek myth is especially popular in the US and India.

Me being British seems to be an amusing novelty for lots of them - they ask me for a cup of tea, or the legendary “bo’tle o’ wa’er” (bottle of water).

And so, after heady consultation with the ChatGPT overlords I resent but liaise with, I can reveal the birth of…

cough

MYTH AND CHIPS

Expect Mr Tumble meets Slavoj Zizek.

Anticipate Attenborough meets Artemis.

Brace yourself for Salad Fingers meets Bob Ross.