98 Fun Facts About Teacher

Anne Sullivan, herself partly blind, is remembered as the lifelong teacher of which deaf-blind author, first reached at a water pump?

Helen Keller, who was six when Sullivan spelled W-A-T-E-R into one hand while pumping water over the other, the breakthrough dramatised in The Miracle Worker. Keller went on to Radcliffe and a writing career; Sullivan stayed 49 years.

Christa McAuliffe, NASA's Teacher in Space, taught which subject at Concord High School in New Hampshire?

Social studies: Christa McAuliffe taught American history, law and economics at Concord High and planned two lessons from orbit before Challenger broke apart on 28 January 1986.

Jaime Escalante, the Bolivian-born teacher behind Stand and Deliver, taught which subject at Garfield High, where his students were accused of cheating?

Calculus: in 1982 the Educational Testing Service made 14 of his students retake the AP exam on suspicion of cheating; the 12 who sat it passed again, and enrolment in his classes soared.

Which actor was Oscar-nominated for playing Escalante in Stand and Deliver (1988)?

Edward James Olmos shadowed Escalante for days to catch his classroom manner, then earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for the role.

Erin Gruwell's students at Wilson High in Long Beach published their own stories as which 1999 book, later filmed with Hilary Swank?

The Freedom Writers Diary takes its name from the Freedom Riders; after intercepting a racist caricature, Gruwell had her class read Anne Frank's diary and write about their own lives.

Which educator qualified as a physician before opening a 'Children's House' for slum children?

Maria Montessori entered an all-boys technical school hoping to become an engineer, switched to medicine and graduated in Rome in 1896, then moved from the clinic to the classroom.

Which philosopher was hired by Philip II of Macedon around 343 BC to tutor his 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great?

Aristotle, Plato's student for some twenty years, taught the boy at Mieza; Alexander is said to have carried a copy of the Iliad annotated by his tutor on campaign and kept it under his pillow.

Which Chinese teacher's Western name is a Latin form of a title meaning 'Master Kong'?

Confucius is the Latin form of Kong Fuzi, 'Master Kong'; the teacher was born Kong Qiu, and his sayings were gathered into the Analects only after his death.

Horace Mann, the reformer who championed free 'common schools', built the public school system of which state?

Massachusetts: as first secretary of its Board of Education from 1837, Mann pushed tax-funded schooling for every child and state-run 'normal schools' to train teachers, and other states soon followed.

Founded in 1635, which is the oldest existing public school in the United States?

Boston Latin School opened more than a year before Harvard and took boys of any social class; Benjamin Franklin, one of five Declaration signers schooled there, left without graduating.

Which German educator coined the word 'kindergarten' in 1840?

Friedrich Fröbel coined 'Kindergarten', 'garden of children', for his play school at Bad Blankenburg; Prussia banned kindergartens in 1851, and he died the next year with the ban still in force.

World Teachers' Day marks a 1966 recommendation on teachers adopted by the ILO and which UN agency?

UNESCO and the ILO adopted the Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers on 5 October 1966, which is why the day falls on that date each year.

Teachers College, whose professor Frank Cyr made America's school buses yellow in 1939, is part of which New York university?

Columbia: Teachers College professor Frank W. Cyr, later dubbed the father of the yellow school bus, called educators and bus makers together in 1939 to swap a jumble of colours and designs for national standards.

The 'lead' in a pencil is actually a mix of clay and which mineral?

Graphite: when a huge pure deposit turned up at Borrowdale in Cumbria in the 16th century, it was taken for a kind of lead and named plumbago, so pencil cores have been 'leads' ever since.

Early blackboards were made of thin sheets of what?

Slate: pupils had long written on hand-held slates before wall-sized sheets of the stone went up, which is why classroom boards stayed black until enamelled steel began replacing slate in the twentieth century.

Which inventor was a teacher of deaf pupils when he patented his most famous device in 1876?

Alexander Graham Bell taught speech to deaf students and married one of them, Mabel Hubbard, whose father backed the experiments that led to the telephone.

Christ's Hospital, believed to be the first English school with a uniform, still dresses pupils in Tudor-style long coats of which colour?

Blue: the long blue coats and yellow socks have barely changed since Tudor times and gave charity 'bluecoat schools' their name; one theory is simply that both dyes were cheap.

Which Nordic country's schools, which start children at seven and set little homework, topped the PISA rankings in the early 2000s?

Finland, where every teacher needs a master's degree, had the world's best teenage readers in the first PISA tests of 2000 and topped science in 2006, though by 2012 it had slipped from the very top.

Which president honoured the first National Teacher of the Year in 1952?

Harry Truman greeted Geraldine Jones, a first-grade teacher from Santa Barbara, in the White House Rose Garden, and presidents have traditionally presented the award ever since.

In Dead Poets Society, John Keating teaches his students which Latin phrase?

Carpe diem, 'seize the day': when Keating is later fired, his boys defy the headmaster and salute him by standing on their desks and calling 'O Captain! My Captain!'

In School of Rock, Jack Black's Dewey Finn poses as a substitute teacher at which school?

Horace Green is the prep school whose principal phones for Dewey's flatmate Ned Schneebly; Dewey takes the call, poses as Ned and forms his fifth-graders into a band.

Which actor plays music teacher Glenn Holland in Mr. Holland's Opus (1995)?

Richard Dreyfuss earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination as Glenn Holland, who takes the Kennedy High job to buy time to write a symphony and stays thirty years.

Abbott Elementary is set in an underfunded public school in which city?

Philadelphia, Quinta Brunson's home city; she named the show after Joyce Abbott, her own sixth-grade teacher, and based Barbara Howard on her mother, a Philadelphia teacher.

Which grade does Janine Teagues teach when Abbott Elementary begins?

Second grade: in the pilot Janine asks for a new classroom rug, principal Ava spends the school's budget on a sign instead, and Melissa's contacts supply the rugs.

In The Magic School Bus, which teacher drives her class inside the human body and out among the planets?

Ms. Frizzle first took the wheel in 1986 after a Scholastic editor proposed mixing science with stories; author Joanna Cole said a teacher of her own had been a little like her.

In Roald Dahl's Matilda, what is the name of Matilda's class teacher?

Miss Honey turns out to be the niece Miss Trunchbull raised and cheated of her inheritance; Matilda's telekinesis frightens the headmistress into fleeing, and the house goes back to its owner.

Which subject does Minerva McGonagall teach at Hogwarts?

Transfiguration: McGonagall teaches it while serving as head of Gryffindor and deputy headmistress, and she gives Hermione a Time-Turner in the third book.

Which actor plays George Feeny, the teacher and neighbour of Cory Matthews on Boy Meets World?

William Daniels, earlier the voice of KITT in Knight Rider, played Feeny for all seven seasons; his real wife, Bonnie Bartlett, joined the cast as the college dean Feeny goes on to marry.

Before becoming Heisenberg, Breaking Bad's Walter White taught which subject?

Chemistry, which is why Walter's meth is purer than any rival's; years earlier he had sold his stake in the company he co-founded for $5,000, and his partners went on to make billions.

Sidney Poitier plays a teacher in London's East End in which 1967 film?

To Sir, with Love put Poitier at the teacher's desk twelve years after he played a rebellious pupil in Blackboard Jungle; Lulu's title song spent five weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

Which 1934 James Hilton novella follows a gentle Latin master through decades at Brookfield School?

Goodbye, Mr. Chips first ran in the British Weekly and took off when The Atlantic reprinted it in 1934; Robert Donat's Chips then beat Clark Gable's Rhett Butler to the Best Actor Oscar.

Which fictional Ohio institution is home to the glee club New Directions?

William McKinley High, where Spanish teacher Will Schuester takes over the club after the previous director is fired for inappropriate conduct. The same school name was used in Freaks and Geeks, also set in the Midwest.

On Welcome Back, Kotter, what were Gabe Kotter's remedial students nicknamed?

The Sweathogs: Kotter returns to teach the remedial class he once belonged to at James Buchanan High, modelled on Gabe Kaplan's own New Utrecht High in Brooklyn; the show launched John Travolta as Vinnie Barbarino.

Which actress plays Elizabeth Halsey, the gold-digging, hungover middle-school teacher of Bad Teacher (2011)?

Cameron Diaz plays her opposite former boyfriend Justin Timberlake, cast as the wealthy substitute Elizabeth chases; CBS turned the film into a short-lived sitcom in 2014.

Ted Lasso is an American coach of which sport before he is hired, with no soccer experience, to run AFC Richmond?

College football, in Wichita, Kansas, where his team had just won a Division II title; the character began in NBC Sports promos for its Premier League coverage, years before the Apple TV series.

Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett created which show to teach preschoolers through television?

Sesame Street was hatched at a 1966 dinner party in Cooney's New York apartment and went on air in November 1969, after she hired Jim Henson to create its Muppets.

Which philosopher, teacher of Plato, wrote nothing down and is known mainly through his pupils' accounts?

Socrates taught by questioning, hence the Socratic method; in 399 BC Athens sentenced him to death for impiety and corrupting the young, and he refused friends' offers to help him escape.

Which educator worked as Hampton's janitor before leading Tuskegee?

Booker T. Washington won his place at Hampton by sweeping a recitation room three times over; the head teacher who inspected it admitted him and then offered him the janitor's job.

Muriel Spark's schoolmistress Jean Brodie teaches her 'set' of girls in which city?

Edinburgh: Jean Brodie moulds her favoured 'set' at the fictional Marcia Blaine School in the 1930s until one of the girls betrays her and ends her career; Maggie Smith won an Oscar in the 1969 film.

Natural chalk, long used for writing on blackboards, is a soft form of which rock?

Limestone: chalk is a soft, porous limestone built from the calcite plates of microscopic plankton on ancient sea floors, though modern 'chalk' sticks are often gypsum.

On The Simpsons, which teacher long had Bart in her fourth-grade class at Springfield Elementary?

Edna Krabappel was voiced by Marcia Wallace, who won an Emmy for the part in 1992; when Wallace died in 2013 the producers retired the character.

India celebrates Teachers' Day on 5 September, the birthday of which philosopher and former president?

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan became president in 1962, and when students and friends asked to celebrate his birthday he asked that the day honour teachers instead.

Australia marks World Teachers' Day on the last Friday of October because 5 October usually falls during what?

School holidays: 5 October lands in the term break in most Australian states, so the celebration waits for the last Friday of October, when pupils are back in class to take part.

A 1977 US Supreme Court decision held that which school punishment did not violate the Constitution?

Paddling: in Ingraham v. Wright (1977) the Court ruled 5-4 that paddling Florida junior-high pupils breached neither the Eighth Amendment nor due process; most states have since banned corporal punishment in schools.

What was the ancient Indian education system called in which pupils lived with their teacher?

Gurukula pupils lived in the teacher's household and shared its chores, paying no fees, only a parting gift called guru dakshina; the Arya Samaj revived the model at Gurukul Kangri in 1902.

Which future US president spent a year teaching Mexican-American children in Cotulla, Texas, in the late 1920s?

Lyndon B. Johnson left college for a year to teach at Cotulla's segregated Welhausen School, and as president he recalled those pupils' poverty when urging Congress to pass voting rights in 1965.

In the Peanuts TV specials, which instrument supplies the 'wah-wah' voice of the unseen schoolteacher?

Trombone: a muted trombone stands in for the teacher and the other adults in the animated specials, an idea credited to the composer Vince Guaraldi.

Teachers in Scotland's schools must be registered with which professional body?

The General Teaching Council for Scotland was set up in 1965 amid concern over standards in the profession; every teacher employed in a Scottish school must by law be on its register.

Which sport did PE instructor James Naismith invent in 1891 to occupy a rowdy class stuck indoors over winter?

Basketball began with a peach basket for a goal at a YMCA training school in Springfield. Naismith had been given 14 days to devise an indoor game that was not too rough.

Before rubber erasers went on sale in 1770, which food was widely used to rub out pencil marks?

Bread, with the crust removed, lifted pencil marks from paper. London instrument maker Edward Nairne said he picked up a lump of rubber by mistake for breadcrumbs, then began selling it.

The singer Sting taught at a first school in Cramlington for two years before co-founding which rock trio in 1977?

The Police had the UK's best-selling single of 1980 with Don't Stand So Close to Me, a song about a schoolteacher. Sting had qualified to teach in 1973 after working as a bus conductor.

Which computer game did student teacher Don Rawitsch create in 1971 for his eighth-grade history class in Minneapolis?

Oregon Trail was written in two weeks with two fellow student teachers, and pupils played it on a teletype with no screen. When the term ended, the trio printed the code and deleted the program.

Which horror writer taught English at Hampden Academy in Maine while his wife rescued his first novel from the trash?

Stephen King had given up on Carrie after three pages, and his wife Tabitha fished them out and persuaded him to finish. The family was living in a mobile home in Hermon at the time.

Which band had 23 pupils from London's Islington Green School sing on a 1979 number one attacking harsh schooling?

Pink Floyd recorded the children for Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, after about a week of practice. The school was given concert tickets, an album and a single in return.

Which sporting venue takes its name from the ancient Greek word for naked?

Gymnasium comes from gymnós, the Greek for naked. Athletes stripped in changing rooms, trained nude and rubbed their skin with olive oil.

Which classroom brand name did Edwin Binney's wife, a former schoolteacher, coin in 1903 from the French for chalk?

Crayola joins craie to 'ola', short for oleaginous, or oily. The Binneys put their wax crayons on sale in June 1903.

Which former First Lady proposed in 1953 that Congress set aside a National Teacher Day to honour educators?

Eleanor Roosevelt's idea took decades to find a fixed place in the calendar. Since 1985 the National Education Association has kept the day on a Tuesday in spring.

In the United States, Teacher Appreciation Week has been held since 1984 in the first full week of which month?

May has held the National PTA's week since 1984, and the National Education Association celebrates National Teacher Day on its Tuesday.

Tennessee teacher John Scopes was fined $100 in 1925 after a famous trial for teaching which scientific theory?

Evolution was barred from Tennessee classrooms by the Butler Act. Scopes, who had only substituted for the biology teacher, was unsure he had ever taught it but agreed to be the test case.

The 1954 school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education was brought against the board of which Kansas city?

Topeka's board was sued by the Browns and twelve other local Black families. The Supreme Court ruled 9–0 that segregated public schools broke the Fourteenth Amendment.

Which six-year-old was taught alone for a year by the one willing teacher after integrating a New Orleans school?

Ruby Bridges had her teacher, Mrs Henry, and a classroom at William Frantz Elementary all to herself. Federal marshals escorted her to school.

Which Soviet satellite, launched in 1957, spurred the US Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act?

Sputnik stirred American fears of a Soviet lead in technology. The 1958 act directed over a billion dollars towards improving science lessons.

Which Civil War nurse opened a free school in Bordentown, New Jersey, only to be replaced as principal by a man?

Clara Barton had built the Bordentown school up until it taught more than 600 people. She later nursed Union soldiers and founded the American Red Cross.

Christa McAuliffe, chosen from over 11,000 applicants to be the first teacher in space, died aboard which shuttle?

Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on 28 January 1986. McAuliffe had planned to teach two lessons from orbit.

Which educator opened a Daytona school for Black girls in 1904 with just six pupils, one of them her own son?

Mary McLeod Bethune saw her little school grow into Bethune-Cookman University. She made its first desks from discarded crates and raised funds by selling sweet potato pies.

Which future prime minister worked as a schoolteacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before emigrating in 1921?

Golda Meir was born in Kiev and reached the United States with her family in 1906. She became prime minister of Israel in 1969.

Oxford mathematics lecturer Charles Dodgson published his children's books under which pen name?

Lewis Carroll is his first two names put into Latin, swapped round and turned back into English. Dodgson held his Oxford lectureship for 26 years.

Which 1954 novel about stranded schoolboys was written by a Salisbury teacher who taught English, Greek and drama?

Lord of the Flies was William Golding's first novel, written while he taught at Bishop Wordsworth's School. He stayed in the classroom until 1961 and won the Nobel Prize in 1983.

Graduates call their old school or university their alma mater, a Latin phrase that literally means what?

Nurturing mother was first a title the Romans gave to goddesses such as Ceres and Cybele. The University of Bologna carries the phrase in its motto.

The word 'mentor' comes from an adviser to young Telemachus in which ancient Greek epic poem?

The Odyssey has Mentor, an old friend of Odysseus, advise his son, though it is often the goddess Athena speaking in his shape. English adopted the name as a noun in 1750.

Which lanky schoolmaster flees the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving's story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow?

Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher from Connecticut, is courting the heiress Katrina Van Tassel, to the fury of a local rival.

Which Charlotte Brontë heroine spends two years as a teacher at Lowood before becoming governess at Thornfield Hall?

Jane Eyre had already spent six years at Lowood as a pupil, enduring cold rooms, poor meals and thin clothing.

Which future children's author took her first teaching job in Dakota Territory two months before her 16th birthday?

Laura Ingalls Wilder gave up teaching when she married Almanzo Wilder in 1885. She was in her sixties when Little House in the Big Woods, her first book, came out in 1932.

The word 'school' comes from the ancient Greek skholē, which originally meant which of these?

Leisure was what free Greeks spent on learned discussion, so the word passed to the talk itself and then to the place where it happened.

Which word for a teacher comes from the Greek for a slave who escorted boys to school?

Pedagogue joins the Greek words for child and leader. In Rome the role went to a slave or freedman who taught citizens' sons the Greek language.

Which word for a school's programme of study comes from the Latin for a running, or the course of a race?

Curriculum shares a root with currere, to run, and in classical Latin could also mean a fast chariot. English picked it up for courses of study in the 1820s.

Which free learning site grew out of a finance worker tutoring a cousin in mathematics online in 2004?

Khan Academy began as lessons for one relative. Founder Sal Khan later quit his job as a financial analyst to run it full time as a nonprofit.

Which term did psychologist Carol Dweck popularise in 2006 for the belief that effort can improve ability?

Growth mindset is Dweck's opposite of a fixed mindset, which treats success as a matter of innate talent. Her book for general readers was called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Which six-level framework for learning goals, published in 1956, was revised in 2001 to run from Remember to Create?

Bloom's taxonomy is named after Benjamin Bloom, who chaired the committee of educators that devised it. The original version put Evaluation, not Create, at the top.

Howard Gardner's 1983 book Frames of Mind proposed which theory, popular with teachers but disputed by psychologists?

Multiple intelligences counts musical and spatial ability as kinds of intelligence alongside the linguistic and logical. Critics reply that research tends to support one general factor.

Wendy Kopp's 1989 Princeton thesis became which organisation that places graduates in low-income schools for two years?

Teach For America recruits recent graduates and professionals for urban and rural classrooms across the United States. Kopp has since written two books about the work.

Which teaching model did Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams popularise from 2007 by posting recorded lectures online?

Flipped classroom teaching began for the pair as a way to help pupils who had missed lessons at Woodland Park High School. Class time then goes on work once set as homework.

Which French psychologist devised the first practical intelligence test with Théodore Simon in the 1900s?

Alfred Binet sat on a 1904 commission deciding how children with learning difficulties should be schooled. An American revision of his scale is still known as the Stanford–Binet.

In Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), the Supreme Court backed pupils suspended for wearing what to protest the Vietnam War?

Black armbands got Mary Beth Tinker, her brother John and Christopher Eckhardt sent home in December 1965. The Court held that pupils keep their free-speech rights inside the school gate.

In the 19th century, which name, borrowed from French, was given to colleges set up specially to train teachers?

Normal schools were meant to set the norm, with model classrooms where trainees could practise. The first is credited to Jean-Baptiste de La Salle at Reims in 1685.

Which shock-rock act topped the UK chart in 1972 with School's Out, a song about the final minutes of term?

Alice Cooper made it the title track of a fifth album, and it became the group's biggest international hit, reaching number seven in the United States.

Which actor hosted the PBS children's series Reading Rainbow, built around a featured book, from its launch in 1983?

LeVar Burton stayed with the show until its original run ended in 2006. It collected a Peabody Award and 26 Emmys along the way.

Which fictional school in Louis Sachar's stories was built 30 storeys high by mistake, with one classroom on each floor?

Wayside School was meant to be a single storey tall with 30 classrooms in a row. The mix-up also left it without a nineteenth floor.

In the picture book Miss Nelson Is Missing!, which fearsome substitute takes over the misbehaving class?

Viola Swamp turns out to be a disguise worn by the gentle Miss Nelson herself. Harry Allard wrote the 1977 book and James Marshall illustrated it.

PowerPoint, now a classroom staple, was first released by Forethought in 1987 for which computer?

Macintosh was its only platform at launch. Microsoft then bought Forethought, its first significant acquisition, and made PowerPoint part of Office.

The quiz platform Kahoot!, which grew out of a university project called Lecture Quiz, comes from which country?

Norway is home to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where Alf Inge Wang built the first prototypes in 2006. The platform itself launched in beta in 2013.

The first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in 1919 for the children of workers at what kind of factory?

Cigarette boss Emil Molt, who ran the Waldorf-Astoria company, asked Rudolf Steiner to set up a school for his employees' children. The movement kept the firm's name.

Which Idaho teacher, Christa McAuliffe's backup in 1986, finally flew in space on a shuttle mission in August 2007?

Barbara Morgan went back to her elementary classroom in McCall until NASA picked her as an astronaut candidate in 1998. The loss of a second shuttle then delayed her flight for years.

Which Czech educator published Orbis Pictus in 1658, often called the first widely used picture textbook for children?

John Amos Comenius first issued it in Latin and German, and it was later republished in many European languages. Its title means the visible world in pictures.

Which animated ABC series began in 1973 after an ad executive's son knew Rolling Stones lyrics but not his times tables?

Schoolhouse Rock grew from one song about multiplying by three, which David McCall commissioned from the musician Bob Dorough. Its first run lasted until 1985.

The traditional 'three Rs' taught in schools are reading, writing and which other basic skill?

Arithmetic earns its R only when the word is spoken with the first letter dropped. Some lists name the third skill as reckoning instead.

The pointed cap once put on slow pupils is named after followers of which medieval theologian, mocked as a hairsplitter?

Duns Scotus was a Scottish scholar whose followers ran the universities until the Reformation. 'Duns man' was an insult by the 1520s, and 'dunce' followed in the 1570s.

In medieval schools, grammar, logic and rhetoric formed which first group of the seven liberal arts?

The trivium was treated as the foundation for the other four arts. Its name in classical Latin meant a place where three roads meet.