12 Rock Stars Who Used to Be Teachers
Rock 'n' roll and education have historically been on opposing sides, fighting for the attention and time commitments of generations of young and impressionable youth.
From 1957, when Chuck Berry started "School Days" with "Ring-ring goes the bell!" through 1979, when Pink Floyd had a bunch of kids yell "We don't need no education," to Bruce Springsteen's 1984 "No Surrender" ("We learned more from a three-minute record / Than we ever learned in school") to even Twisted Sister shouting "Be chrool to your scuel / in the name of rock 'n' roll!"), rock's rebellious leanings have been at odds with the order and authority of the classroom. There are probably some kids in your neighborhood right now, in someone's garage, coming up with the next fist-raising anthem against teachers and lockers and the like.
But some of our favorite performers actually were part of the education/authority complex at one point. Sixth graders in New York City were once taught by a demon; the spiky-haired bloke who would go on to write "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" once taught young ones to be articulate; and the man who would become one of the great songwriters of his or any other generation taught literature, of all things, to soldiers.
Let us gaze into the past of a dozen of these educators-turned-performers (or, in one case, a performer-turned-educator-turned-performer) and see what skeletons might be hiding in their old classrooms.