Teach your children well
I know several teachers (One of them is my mom. Hi mom!), and from them I've learned two things: teaching is tough work, and you get a heck of a lot of vacation time. Which second fact makes it a great career choice for aspiring musicians — teach all year, tour for the summer, get signed to a label and never look back. That's how it works, right? Well, that's how it worked for the following.
• The most famous example of teacher-turned-rockstar is probably Sting, who spent two years as an English teacher, an experience that inspired the Police hit "Don't Stand So Close to Me."
• To indie rock fans, the hyper-prolific Bob Pollard of Guided By Voices (among other things) might be a more obvious example. The notorious champion drinker taught fourth grade for several years.
Guided by Voices, "Teenage FBI"
more after the jump.
• Gene Simmons, according to an article in the Observer (the British one, not the pink NY one), was fired from his post in Harlem when he replaced "his pupils' Shakespeare books with Spiderman comics."
KISS "Rock n Roll All Night"
• Iron & Wine's Sam Beam was a professor of film and cinematography at the University of Miami and Miami International University of Art & Design before he struck it big. He's most well known for his cover of The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights", but he's got a lot more than that going on these days.
Iron & Wine "Naked as We Came"
• Most recently, Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig spent a year in the Teach for America program, where he apparently got a taste of the taunting that awaited his ultrapreppy band. His students were not fans. But I am!
Vampire Weekend, "A-Punk"
Anyone know any more?
—eh
