When I was at the grocery store recently, I heard a young child shout: “Grandma – come here! Look! It’s my teacher! Come take my picture with her!” He ran up to his teacher, who was standing in line with her grocery cart, and he immediately asked if he could give her a hug. Grandma was right behind this excited child. “We’ve heard a lot about you in our family,” she said, as she got ready to take their picture.
I obviously don’t know what it’s like to be famous, but I have to imagine it goes a little like that. People are running up to you, asking if they can take your picture, and bragging to their family members that they already know who you are.
Teachers, particularly in rural areas like South Dakota, are famous in their own right. Growing up, my dad was a teacher and the head boys basketball coach at Roosevelt High School in Sioux Falls. During basketball season, video clips of him coaching were on tv, his voice was on the radio, and his picture was sometimes on the front page of the Argus Leader. Sounds like fame to me, or at least that’s how it felt at the time.
If I go somewhere with Gina Benz, or any other teacher for that matter, she is regularly stopped by students and their families, past and present. When you are a teacher, people know who you are. Teacher Famous, I’d like to call it.
Teacher fame – like all forms of fame, I imagine – is complicated. When so many people know of you, they are also watching you. And because teachers play such an important role in the lives of children, those extra eyes might cast a more critical gaze than they would otherwise. What teachers are saying, wearing, posting, and doing is noticed, praised, and scrutinized by the public.
But what if you were both Teacher Famous and actually famous? That is the case for Gabe Dannenbring, a science teacher in the Sioux Falls School District who became famous on TikTok when he posted a video recounting the jokes his middle school students made about his outfit. 1.6 million followers later and Mr. Dannenbring lands deals with Amazon, Campbell’s soup and NBC, is on the most followed teacher podcast in the world: Teachers Off Duty, toured in the live show Bored Teacher’s Comedy Tour, and was a contestant in the Netflix reality show Surviving Paradise.
