Most of our teachers aren’t celebrities, but here are some famous people who also taught. Let’s take a look! prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Ezra Koenig: The lead singer of the band Vampire Weekend started his professional life as an English teacher in Brooklyn, NY, as part of the Teach for America programme.
Sylvester Stallone: Famous for films like Rocky and Rambo. He once studied in beauty school, but dropped out to attend the American College of Switzerland, where he studied drama and worked as a gym teacher.
J.K. Rowling: Before becoming the best-selling author of Harry Potter, she worked in Portugal, teaching English as a foreign language. Some of the teachers in the book series were inspired by former teachers of hers... though she won’t say which!
Jon Hamm: The lead actor in Mad Men, and a character in the popular film Bridesmaids, actually started off as a drama teacher in St. Louis, Missouri (USA). He even taught actress Ellie Kemper, who is in the US version of The Office and a fellow co-star in Bridesmaids!
Hugh Jackman: Back in the 1980’s, you would have found Hugh Jackman working as a gym teacher at Uppingham School in England. Nobody would have known that the gym teacher who would heckle you about physical fitness, force you to climb up the rope, and urge you to run faster would be a future Hollywood actor. Turns out, Jackman’s former students still fondly remembered him and one of his students reconnected with Jackman in Zurich on the red carpet. Reporter Rollo Ross, who admitted that he didn’t really recognize Jackman in his first movie until his friends pointed it out to him.
Gordon Matthew Sumner aka Sting: The lead singer of The Police, also known as Gordon Sumner, actually went to school to be a teacher. After graduation, he taught at St. Paul’s Middle School in Cramlington, England for 2 years before turning to fame as a rock star.
Barack Obama: After graduating from Harvard Law School in Massachusetts, USA, he took a job teaching constitutional law in his hometown’s University of Chicago. He was a professor there for 12 years before running for U.S. Senate.
Madeline Albright: She might be better known for her role as the first female Secretary of State, serving under Bill Clinton’s second term, but students at Georgetown University now know her as a professor of international relations at the college’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. With her job record, along with her Ph.D from Columbia University in public law and government, I’d say she’s pretty well qualified for the job.
Stephen King: After graduating from The University of Maine with a Bachelor’s degree in English, Stephen earned a teaching certificate and immediately started seeking a job in the teaching field. Fortunately for his writing career, he couldn’t find a job right away, so he had to work at an industrial laundry facility and started writing short stories to supplement his income. Eventually in 1971, he did find a position at the Hampden Academy in Maine. He continued to write short stories in the evening during this point in his career and started developing ideas for his novels. In 1973, Carrie was accepted by Doubleday Publishing and he was able to retire from teaching and focus on his writing career.