Just for fun

6 famous former teachers

There’s a (cruel) saying directed at our educators: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. However, our list of ex-teachers shows that being a brilliant teacher also often means that you’ll excel in other areas. From writing and acting to inventing it seems very clear that those who can, teach.

  1. Alexander Graham Bell The Scottish-born inventor of the telephone spent a significant portion of his life as a teacher. As a child, his experiencing of observing his mother go deaf led to his interest in acoustics. This spurred him on to, aged 16, become a teaching assistant of elocution and music at the Westin House Academy in Scotland. In 1865, after attending university, he returned to the school as an assistant master. He also helped his father with Visible Speech demonstrations at a private school for the deaf in South Kensington, and later worked at several prominent deaf schools across America.
  2. Art Garfunkel One half of Simon and Garfunkel, Art may have been named after one school subject, but was just as gifted at another: Maths. He studied Art History and Maths at Columbia University, and would have completed a doctorate in Maths if it hadn’t been for the incredible musical success he encountered. However he did, for a time, teach Geometry at Litchfield Preparatory School in Connecticut, but then Bridge Over Troubled Water came out – and the rest is history.
  3. J. K. Rowling Before she rose to worldwide fame, lauded as the architect of the most magical literary world ever created, Jo Rowling spent time in Portugal teaching English. Following a painful divorce and the death of her mother, she spent her time abroad plotting out the Harry Potter series. Returning to Scotland, she began a teaching course at Edinburgh University in 1995, but her focus ultimately lay with her writing.
  4. Sir William Golding Golding taught Philosophy and English at Bishop’s Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, Wiltshire. He once allowed a class of boys to debate with complete freedom. The resulting disorder was chaos enough to inspire his seminal book, Lord of the Flies, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
  5. George Orwell Eric Blair, or George Orwell as he is more commonly known, is most widely remembered for his depictions of dystopian worlds, where paranoia and surveillance ruled. However, he also spent time working as a teacher in West London – first Hayes, then Uxbridge. Whilst a teenage student at Eton, Blair also had the privilege of being taught French by Aldous Huxley, the novelist famed for writing Brave New World – a work with which Blair’s texts frequently draw comparison.
  6. Greg Davies If you’re under the age of 21 then you will have most definitely seen the comic and actor Greg Davies in his iconic role as Mr Gilbert in the Inbetweeners. Davies is clearly a loyal follower of the ‘method acting’ technique, having previously spent 13 years teaching drama and English at schools in Berkshire and Twickenham.

By a guest blogger

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