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Please add profiles of your teaching ancestors -- anyone from famous professors to Sunday school teachers, and everyone in between.
Collaborators: please update the project page, add resources, images, documents, and invite others to join.
At right: A perfect example of the classic American one-room schoolhouse, as seen in Elizabethtown, Hardin County, Kentucky.
Notables
Many people famous for things other than teaching have served as teachers. Some notables include:
- Gov. J. Lindsay Almond -- taught and was a high school principal in Virginia
- Dave Brubeck -- taught music and led high school student groups in Fairfield County, Connecticut for decades after achieving fame
- Ezekiel Cheever I -- Noteworthy colonial headmaster of the Boston Latin School
- Stephen Colbert -- longtime Catholic Sunday school teacher
- Prudence Crandall -- led the first racially-integrated school for girls in America, in Canterbury, Connecticut
- Sheryl Crow -- elementary school music teacher in Missouri
- Tony Danza -- taught 10th-grade English in Philadelphia
- Bob Denver -- taught elementary school phys ed, history, and math in California
- Amelia Earhart -- member of Purdue University's aviation faculty
- Sutton Foster -- currently a professor and instructor of theatre at Ball State University
- Bill Gaither -- taught English before becoming a gospel music star
- Art Garfunkel -- at the height of his musical career became a high school math teacher in Connecticut
- Andy Griffith -- taught high school English in North Carolina
- Capt. Nathan Hale -- Revolutionary War hero "with but one life to lose for [his] country"
- Jon Hamm -- taught drama at a St. Louis high school; Ellie Kemper was one of his students
- Peter Hermann -- spent two years in the Teach for America corps
- Mother Jones -- schoolteacher before becoming a labor activist
- Stephen King -- taught high school English in Maine before his first bestseller was published
- Kris Kristofferson -- Rhodes Scholar who taught English literature at West Point
- Denis Leary -- met his wife, novelist Ann Leary, when she was one of his graduate students at Emerson College
- Wynton Marsalis -- teaching career includes the Lincoln Center and the Juilliard jazz program
- Bill O'Reilly -- taught history and English at a Miami-area Catholic high school for two years
- Itzhak Perlman -- teaching since the 1970s, currently at the Juilliard School's pre-college program
- Wallace Shawn -- taught English in India as a Fulbright Scholar
- Gene Simmons -- 6th-grade teacher in Spanish Harlem
- Jill Stein -- instructor for decades at Harvard Medical School
- Rev. Ralph Wheelock -- America's first public school teacher
Resources
- The History of Education in America - Colonial Education
- The New-England primer; a history of its origin and development; with a reprint of the unique copy of the earliest known edition and many facsimile illustrations and reproductions (1897)
- An Inventory of the New York Female Association Records, 1798-1988 Formed in 1798 to give aid to the sick poor, the New York Female Association created the first public female school in New York in 1800.