Skip to content

Celebrities who used to be teachers!

Choosing a career is a matter of personal inclinations before it is a result of some sort of training. A lot of people have changed the course of their professional lives because they saw  light gleaming in new directions. This may not mean that they were unsuccessful in their first jobs. Rather this may mean that they thought that they could be more productive and useful in other areas of interest.  The following celebrities who are now musicians, writers or actors  were once teachers.

Sting

Sting
Sting

At the beginning of his career Sting performed in various bands at night while holding down a steady day job as a school teacher.

After jobs as a bus conductor, a construction labourer, and a tax officer, he attended Northern Counties College of Education, (which later became part of Northumbria University) from 1971 to 1974 and qualified as a teacher. He then worked as a schoolteacher at St. Paul’s First School in Cramlington for two years.

Stephen King

 

stephen Edwin king
Stephen Edwin king

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American writer of contemporary horror fiction, science fiction, fantasy literature, and screenplays. An estimated 300–350 million copies of King’s novels and short story collections have been sold, and many of his stories have been adapted for film, television, and other media.

As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned, speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later did the family learn of the friend’s death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired King’s dark, disturbing creations,but King himself has dismissed the idea.

After leaving the university, King gained a certificate to teach high school but, being unable to find a teaching post immediately, initially supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men’s magazines such as Cavalier.

Billy Crystal

Billycrystal
Billy Crystal

Billy’s real dream was to be a professional baseball player. He spent long hours in the summers playing softball in the middle of Park Avenue with his brothers and his father, a former pitcher at St. John’s University. However, he would never end up playing a game as the baseball program was suspended during his freshman year. This would lead him to leave the university and move back to New York.

After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from NYU in 1970, Billy temporarily worked as a substitute teacher until he was able to get gigs as a stand-up comic. Later he became well-known for his comic performance in television and cinema.

J. K. Rowling

J.k.Rowling
J.k.Rowling

 

Joanne “Jo” Murray, ( born 31 July 1965),better known under the pen name J. K. Rowling,  is a British author best known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series. She had the idea for the book   on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies, and been the basis for a popular series of films.

Aside from writing the Potter novels, Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her “rags to riches” life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years.

When she was writing Harry Potter, she moved to Portugal to teach English. There  she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes. They had a child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford) on 27 July 1993 in Portugal. They separated in November 1993.

After Jessica’s birth and the separation from her husband, Rowling had left her teaching job in Portugal and decided to teach in Scotland. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on welfare. She wrote in many cafés, especially Nicolson’s Café, whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep.

Robert Frost

Robert_Frost
Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

He attended liberal arts studies for two years where he did well. He later left  Harvard to support his growing family. Grandfather Frost had, shortly before his death, purchased a farm for the young couple in Derry, New Hampshire; and Robert worked the farm for nine years, while writing early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to education as an English teacher, at Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Art Garfunkel

Art Garfunkel
Art Garfunkel

 

In 1963, Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon formed their duo under their own names as “Simon and Garfunkel. Garfunkel was good at mathematics; he nearly earned a doctorate in the subject and was teaching math at the Litchfield Preparatory School in Connecticut when “Bridge Over Troubled Water” soared to the top of the charts.

Andy Griffith

Andy Griffith
Andy Griffith

 

Andy Samuel Griffith (born June 1, 1926) is an American actor, director, producer, Grammy Award-winning Southern-gospel singer, and writer. After graduation, he taught English for a few years at Goldsboro High School in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Tags:

Copyright © My English Pages. All rights reserved.