Composer, lyricist, singer, actor, playwright, and producer Lin-Manuel Miranda is also a former English teacher.
Almost everyone has heard of composer, lyricist, singer, actor, playwright, and producer Lin-Manuel Miranda. He’s probably best known for creating and starring in the Broadway musical Hamilton. But did you know that he was once a junior high school English teacher?
Lin-Manuel was born Jan. 16, 1980, in New York City, the son of Puerto Rican parents. His father, Luis Miranda, Jr., was a political consultant father. His mother, Luz Towns-Miranda, was a clinical psychologist. Lin-Manuel has one sister, also named Luz. The family lived in the Hispanic neighborhood of Inwood in Manhattan.
The Miranda children were raised in a musically-oriented family. Both siblings took piano lessons. The music of Broadway featured prominently in the home, but Lin-Manuel also developed an appreciation for hip-hop, including the music of the Beastie Boys, Boogie Down Productions, and Eric B. & Rakim.
During his pre-teen and teenage years, Lin-Manuel attended Hunter College’s elementary and high schools. During these years, he performed in student stage productions. Once he graduated from high school, he enrolled at Wesleyan University, where he majored in theater studies.
After college, Lin-Manuel accepted a teaching position. He taught seventh grade English for one year. Then he became a substitute teacher at his alma mater, Hunter College High School. That’s where he was working when his musical In the Heights caught the interest of Broadway producers.
“Hunter had asked me to stay on to continue to teach part time,” the former teacher remembered. But here came a chance to follow his dreams on Broadway. He asked his father, “What should I do? Should I keep teaching or should I just kind of sub and do gigs to pay the rent, and really throw myself into writing full time?”
His father responded with a heartfelt letter. “I really want to tell you to keep the job — that’s the smart ‘parent thing’ to do — but when I was 17, I was a manager at the Sears in Puerto Rico. I basically threw it all away to go to New York, [and] I didn’t speak a lot of English. It made no sense, but it was what I needed to do,” Lin-Manuel recalled the letter said. “It makes no sense to leave your job to be a writer, but I have to tell you to do it,” the elder Miranda advised. “You have to pursue that if you want.” The former teacher’s success is, as they say, history.
Since then, Lin-Manuel has garnered three Grammy Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship. He was also honored at Kennedy Center in 2018. But one of his favorite trophies is the one he earned when he was a junior in high school. “Because I got straight C’s in math all through high school,” he once confessed. The award, he said, “is on my shelf next to my Grammy.”
To read more about the life of Lin-Manuel Miranda, follow this link to Biography.