How many rock stars and celebrities does it take to honor a teacher?
Last Saturday night in Red Bank, the answer was a lot of them.
Steven Van Zandt spent the day at the Count Basie Center for the Arts collecting a star on its Walk of Fame, introduced by his old friend Jon Bon Jovi. Then he turned the spotlight on someone else: teachers.
The gala that followed, the inaugural Teachers Hall of Fame from TeachRock, the nonprofit Van Zandt founded to bring music into the classroom, drew nearly 1,500 people.
Pete Davidson hosted. Bon Jovi, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Newark native Jeff Ross, the Roastmaster General, took the stage. Kool & the Gang played a full concert. And Bruce Springsteen made a surprise appearance to present Morello with a Lifetime Achievement Award honoring his late mother, a longtime teacher.
It was a big night for a cause that runs on free lesson plans. TeachRock says more than 80,000 teachers use its music-based curriculum, reaching more than a million students.
It was also a night full of great lines. Here are 10 of the best, with context provided as needed.
10. Davidson: “Stevie Van Zandt spent more than a decade supporting teachers and students. He marched in Los Angeles with striking teachers, and even visits schools all the time, thoroughly freaking out kids who’d just binge-watched The Sopranos.”
9. Springsteen (on Mary Morello’s fight against censoring rock and rap records for explicit content.): “I was personally banned from Starbucks at one point.”
8. Bon Jovi (describing the kindness Van Zandt showed him when he was a kid working as an errand runner in one of the recording studios Van Zandt used. Asking how he was and genuinely caring, running to get sandwiches and saying “get one for yourself” and letting him record some hand claps and putting it on the record.): “Sometimes it’s those little things that add up to big things.”
7. Van Zandt: “If you want kids to do better at reading and math, give them more of the arts.”
6. Morello (on a lesson his mom taught him on the importance of helping others and why he started the “Mary Morello Memorial Foundation”): “No energy expenditure for others is ever wasted.”
5. Ross: “I was born in Newark, Beth Israel Hospital. I was born with two minor birth defects, which was pretty good for New Jersey back then.”
4. Van Zandt: “Their job is not just getting the kids through school but getting them through life.”
3. Morello (on a lesson his mom taught him that preceded a story about how his mother refused to buy grapes when he was a kid to support farmers, and the impact it had on him. Alternative quote could be “we have to help people because we can”): “Courage is contagious.”
2. Van Zandt: “The kids might have all the answers, but great teachers have the right questions.”
1. Bon Jovi: “In church, they taught us in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But in my house, it was in the name of Bruce, Little Steven and Southside Johnny.”
