Thread: America's Next Top Model

Can anyone tell me what the words "I'm too cool for school to act like this" mean in the following passage, that sounds at 34:55 – 35:15 in

Топ-модель по-американски 19 сезон / America’s Next Top Model College (2012) - Онлайн смотреть в хорошем качестве

She can't help the fact that she looks sexy in the picture 'cause she is a pretty girl. The only thing...every time I work with you, it still seems like you don't want it. And it's almost like, "I'm too cool for school to act like this or go all out." Like, say you come in for a casting. Well, I need you to act the fool for me right now. What are you gonna do? You can't just stand there and be like, "Uh... uh..."

Is it "I'm too cool to be taught to act like this" or just "I'm too cool to act like this"? What is "for school"? Maybe "cool for school" is an idiom?

Originally Posted by Lena

Is it "I'm too cool to be taught to act like this" or just "I'm too cool to act like this"?

Yes -- or, to be more exact, it's "I mistakenly think that I'm too cool for this," because "too cool for school" is usually (though not always) sarcastic. Way back in 1940, the Fox and the Cat told Pinocchio that books and education are for losers, and that he should follow the glamorous life of an actor, instead:



...of course, we know that Pinocchio ends up being turned into a donkey and gets swallowed by a whale, etc.

And when I was a kid in the 1980s, there were various made-for-TV movies about teenagers who think that School Isn't Cool, so they run away to Hollywood in order to become Famous Movie Stars, but within a matter of months they're having sex with truck drivers to buy heroin, and they get pregnant and have an illegitimate baby with HIV and accidentally feed the poor child a box of rat-poison in the mistaken belief that it's baby cereal -- being totally unable to read the words "DANGER RAT POISON DO NOT EAT" because they were too cool for school!!!!