Teacher Trivia
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98 free Teacher trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
41 free teacher trivia questions with answers. This teacher trivia quiz was built for staff-room quizzes, teacher-appreciation events and anyone who has ever stood in front of a class. Forty-one questions cover the real teachers who became legends (Anne Sullivan, Christa McAuliffe, Jaime Escalante, Erin Gruwell, Maria Montessori, Horace Mann), the teachers everyone knows from film and TV (John Keating, Dewey Finn, Mr. Holland, Ms. Frizzle, Miss Honey, Professor McGonagall, Mr. Feeny, Janine Teagues, Walter White), and the odd history of the school day itself: the first American public school, why school buses are yellow, where kindergarten came from and who first fought back against homework. Most questions are pitched so a mixed staff-room team can argue about them; a few are hard enough to settle who really knows their pedagogy. Feel free to lift the whole set for an end-of-term quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the people, shows and institutions involved, and each question carries its source.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Anne Sullivan, herself partly blind, is remembered as the lifelong teacher of which deaf-blind author, first reached at a water pump?
Helen Keller
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.
Q 02Christa McAuliffe, NASA's Teacher in Space, taught which subject at Concord High School in New Hampshire?
Social studies
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.
Q 03Jaime Escalante, the Bolivian-born teacher behind Stand and Deliver, taught which subject at Garfield High, where his students were accused of cheating?
Calculus
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.
Q 04Which actor was Oscar-nominated for playing Escalante in Stand and Deliver (1988)?
Edward James Olmos
Edward James Olmos shadowed Escalante for days to catch his classroom manner, then earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for the role.
Q 05Erin 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
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.
Q 06Which educator qualified as a physician before opening a 'Children's House' for slum children?
Maria Montessori
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.
Q 07Which philosopher was hired by Philip II of Macedon around 343 BC to tutor his 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great?
Aristotle
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.
Q 08Which Chinese teacher's Western name is a Latin form of a title meaning 'Master Kong'?
Confucius
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.
Q 09Horace Mann, the reformer who championed free 'common schools', built the public school system of which state?
Massachusetts
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.
Q 10Founded in 1635, which is the oldest existing public school in the United States?
Boston Latin
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.
Q 11Which German educator coined the word 'kindergarten' in 1840?
Friedrich Fröbel
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.
Q 12World Teachers' Day marks a 1966 recommendation on teachers adopted by the ILO and which UN agency?
UNESCO
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.
Q 13Teachers College, whose professor Frank Cyr made America's school buses yellow in 1939, is part of which New York university?
Columbia
Q 21In School of Rock, Jack Black's Dewey Finn poses as a substitute teacher at which school?
Horace Green
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.
Q 22Which actor plays music teacher Glenn Holland in Mr. Holland's Opus (1995)?
Richard Dreyfuss
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.
Q 23Abbott Elementary is set in an underfunded public school in which city?
Philadelphia
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.
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.
Q 14The 'lead' in a pencil is actually a mix of clay and which mineral?
Graphite
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.
Q 15Early blackboards were made of thin sheets of what?
Slate
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.
Q 16Which inventor was a teacher of deaf pupils when he patented his most famous device in 1876?
Alexander Graham Bell
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.
Q 17Christ's Hospital, believed to be the first English school with a uniform, still dresses pupils in Tudor-style long coats of which colour?
Blue
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.
Q 18Which Nordic country's schools, which start children at seven and set little homework, topped the PISA rankings in the early 2000s?
Finland
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.
Q 19Which president honoured the first National Teacher of the Year in 1952?
Harry Truman
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.
Q 20In Dead Poets Society, John Keating teaches his students which Latin phrase?
Carpe diem
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!'
Q 24Which grade does Janine Teagues teach when Abbott Elementary begins?
Second grade
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.
Q 25In The Magic School Bus, which teacher drives her class inside the human body and out among the planets?
Ms. Frizzle
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.
Q 26In Roald Dahl's Matilda, what is the name of Matilda's class teacher?
Miss Honey
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.
Q 27Which subject does Minerva McGonagall teach at Hogwarts?
Transfiguration
Transfiguration: McGonagall teaches it while serving as head of Gryffindor and deputy headmistress, and she gives Hermione a Time-Turner in the third book.
Q 28Which actor plays George Feeny, the teacher and neighbour of Cory Matthews on Boy Meets World?
William Daniels
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.
Q 29Before becoming Heisenberg, Breaking Bad's Walter White taught which subject?
Chemistry
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.
Q 30Sidney Poitier plays a teacher in London's East End in which 1967 film?
To Sir, with Love
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.