Taylor Swift's English Teacher Joke Is a Reminder of How She Sees Herself

For as long as she's been one of the biggest artists on the planet, Taylor Swift has never shied away from a good riddle. In announcing her engagement to Travis Kelce, she wrote that "your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married."

The second she wrote that, plenty of people started to wonder what she might mean by suggesting that she is an English teacher. Here's what we know about why she said it, and what it might mean.

Taylor Swift's suggestion that she is an English teacher and Travis is a gym teacher is just the latest example of her suggesting that her romance with Travis is in some ways straight out of a storybook. Travis is, of course, a bit of a meathead and is one of the great football players of her generation. Taylor, meanwhile, thinks of herself as bookish and literary, and that's certainly true to some extent.

Although, while many of Taylor's early albums suggest that she did not see herself as the popular girl, she is undeniably popular now. So, while she might not think of herself as a cheerleader, it's hard to deny that she has resonated with the populace in a way few musicians have ever done. The most simple way to understand Swift's caption, though, is that she is slotting both herself and Travis into familiar and approachable archetypes.

By slotting themselves into familiar archetypes, Taylor is helping her 280 million followers get a sense of who each of them are. Your average English teacher is not a billionaire, though, and your average gym teacher is not a former tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Part of the reason that Taylor might have used these archetypes, then, is to make their relationship seem more normal and approachable than it might actually be.

Of course, it's also possible that Taylor herself also likes the archetypes, and sees herself as the world's most successful English teacher. It doesn't necessarily have to be the case that the caption is a cynical ploy to make her seem familiar and approachable.

The truth of the matter is that we don't know for sure why Taylor decided to caption the post this way, but making her seem approachable is certainly one of the end results.

Taylor's entire career has been based in part on her willingness to share parts of herself with her audience, both in person and through her music. At the same time, though, she has been careful not to share everything, which has left her fans speculating about exactly what she means in the various songs she puts out.

The same is true of her Instagram captions. There's no one definitive explanation for why Taylor used the metaphor she used. She probably just thought it was apt, but if you're a fan, you can read into it as deeply as you'd like.