Fashion victims Geography teachers are the butt of many a style joke. Why?

Poor old Evan Davis. Not only does he have to rise early to present the Today programme on Radio 4 then try to step into Jeremy Paxman’s well-buffed brogues as presenter of Newsnight, but now he’s come top in GQ’s Worst Dressed Men survey. “On screen he looks more like a supply geography teacher,” writes the magazine in its February edition.

Now I imagine half the geography teachers reading are bristling with anger and the other half are shrugging their shoulders and saying: “Here we go again. Once more the lazy journalistic cliche about how poorly we dress is wheeled out, and all because a few of us know our fluvial process from our aeolian, but not our Gucci from our Prada.” Or something like that.

I dare say a great many geography teachers do know their Gucci from their Prada and those who don’t couldn’t care less. But whatever the case, they must all wonder why it’s always geography teachers who get the fashion flak.

The question has certainly been posed by the Times Educational Supplement which, along with Tom Brown’s Schooldays and the situations vacant section of the local newspaper, are required reading for teachers. “Why in the world bait geography teachers for their underdeveloped sense of dress?” it asked in a 2012 article written by a geography teacher. But answer had he none.

Weirdly, there are no Twitter results at all for #coolgeographyteacher. So whatever the polar opposite of trending is, #coolgeographyteacher is doing it on social media. Even weirder though, you don’t have to dig too far before you come up with someone trying to tell you that geography teachers are actually cool – or, at least, that their traditional uniform of sensible Clarks shoes, baggy corduroy trousers and old tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, is cool.

“Too cool for school! Geography teachers are an unlikely style icon as sales of tweed jackets, cord trousers and cardigans soar,” yelped one tabloid in 2013 after Debenhams noticed a few more young people trying to dress like Tinie Tempah.

But did geography teachers ever dress like that? The only one I ever encountered certainly didn’t. More medallion man than magma man, he would come to class in a tracksuit (he also taught PE). The only thing I learned about chalky deposits, meanwhile, was that he could leave one on your forehead if he flung a piece of the blackboard variety at you and you didn’t duck quickly enough (there’s a particular noise chalk makes when it thwacks off a wall papered with bad haikus and maps of the Lake District, one that I will always associate with the teaching of geography at my Cumbrian secondary school).

So it’s a mystery to me why the term “geography teacher” has become such an insult. Perhaps there are some geo-hipsters out there – male or female, fluvial or aeolian – who can enlighten us. Better still, tweet some pictures: let’s get this baby trending, in every sense.