“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
So wrote pop icon Taylor Swift on her
, alongside a picture of said “educators” embracing in a flowery garden, and showing off a massive engagement ring. The post was punctuated with a firecracker and backed by her song So High School.
Within hours, online likes surged past the 13 million that is the population of Swift’s home state of Pennsylvania, although it’s likely well-wishers were more spread out than just the tri-state area.
Some
have pointed out that the metaphor works. Travis Kelce, the newly minted fiancé, is a tight end (yes, you can snicker) with the Kansas City Chiefs, putting him squarely in “gym teacher” realm.
And Swift’s fans have long said that she gives off “English teacher vibes,” from the
in her lyrics — Romeo and Juliet in the song Love Story; The Scarlett Letter in New Romantics, etc. — to the fan who
: “taylor would be my favorite english teacher and i’d probably have a crush on her.”
And she’d probably have some words for you about punctuation and capitalization, young lady, but let’s table that for a moment. My gym teacher and my English teacher never married each other to my knowledge — is that even allowed under board policy? — but if they did I’m pretty sure the engagement ring wouldn’t
and be said to be worth about $550,000. (All figures in U.S. dollars.)
English teachers in America make about $57,000 annually or around $30 and hour, although top-level educators can get into the $80,000 range. Gym teachers make about $5,000 less but they do get to blow a whistle at kids who misbehave.
Ms. Swift, as she’d want her students to call her, doesn’t have a set salary or an hourly wage, but estimates are that she raked in more than $400 million last year, bringing her net worth to over $1.6 billion. If we assume a 40-hour workweek that works out to a little under $200,000 an hour, or an English teacher’s salary every 20 minutes or so.
Kelce’s salary is easier to compute. He made $17 million with the Chiefs last year as part of a two-year contract, which lines up with gym teachers making less than their more literary counterparts.
But wait — tradition has it that an engagement ring should set you back three months’ salary. By that reckoning, this gym teacher should have shelled out more than $4 million on a rock.
The reported half million he spent at
jewellers is definitely at the low end of the scale. If your high-school football coach had spent a similar amount of his salary to woo your favourite English teacher, he would have paid about $1,500 — still a doable sum, but you’re not getting anywhere close to eight carats for that kind of cash.
Ann Grimmett, the vice president of merchandising at Jared Jewelers told Elle that she thinks the ring would have cost between $250,000 and $500,000. “We estimate the price of her ring to be $550,000,” Benjamin Khordipour, of Estate Diamond Jewelry told brides.com.
put the cost at between $1 million and $5 million.
Kindred Lubeck, the designer behind the custom
ring, hasn’t said anything about the price, but rings on her
website range from about $4,000 to $40,000.
Still to come is news of the couple’s wedding. High school teachers are likely to pick a summer date when they’re both away from work. Early summer could work with the NFL’s season, and Swift is said to not have
planned, so a proper teachers’ wedding could be in the cards.