Humble...but LOUD Beginnings

I didn't always want to be a teacher; in fact, I wanted to be a dentist as a kid. It's not that I liked what dentists actually DID. I think I was told that I had nice teeth so often as a kid, that I figured at the very least, I had the foundational requirements.

I actually came to teaching from the stage; I was the lead vocalist of the most famous band never to become famous… JEMANI. And here’s the thing—JEMANI wasn’t some random garage band playing for our cousins and the neighborhood stray cat. We were popular. We won awards, we got accolades, we had fans, we had momentum… we just could never make it over that elusive record label finish line. The industry loved us, but apparently not enough to make us rich and famous.

When the smoke machines shut down, the tour life slowed up, and the amps got packed away, reality tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “So what’s your plan now, rock star?” Which is how I found myself holding a laminated roster, a dry erase marker, and an emergency sub plan, staring into the eyes of my first 6th-grade class.

Those kids did not know what hit them. They signed up for Reading, Writing, and maybe an occasional field trip. What they got instead was a high-energy frontman that used humor, music and real world examples to try to convince them that comma splices matter and "finna" is not a word.

On the real, I probably really messed those kids up! Lol! But honestly, coming from the stage ended up being the best training I could’ve asked for. I already knew how to perform, how to read a crowd, how to manage hecklers (middle schoolers specialize in that), and how to keep an audience engaged—even when the material wasn’t exactly Billboard Top 40.

Even though I was nowere near as confident as I portrayed, what surprised me was that - while other teachers were battling rebellion interruptions, and disengagement - my students showed up differently. They didn’t want to disappoint me. It wasn’t fear-based compliance — it was connection. Somewhere in the midst of the realness and the ridiculousness, they claimed me. They started calling me “Unk,” and before long, kids I didn’t even teach were referring to me as their school “dad.”

The truth is, I had no idea what I was doing at first. But somewhere in the improvisation and the honesty, I accidentally became a good teacher. I discovered I had a gift for making disengaged kids actually give a damn — not because I made school easier, but because I made it make sense.