Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime

The hardcore kid-to-school teacher pipeline is well established by this point. But nobody tells you about the "passion tax" you might be asked to pay on either road.

Your author in November 2013, sitting in my office when I worked as a teacher for the City University of New York. Brooklyn, NY.

I.

Throughout my entire life, I have only ever had one true ambition: From the age of five, I told anyone who would listen that I wanted to be a teacher. For several years of my childhood, I was the kid who came home from “real” school only to play “pretend” school—essentially regurgitating everything I learned that day, with the aid of a small chalkboard, to my invisible students. Teaching always felt like an important job to me, and even as a child, I always felt like I should be doing important work. There was never a moment in my childhood, for example, when I dreamed of playing in a band. There was never a moment when I dreamed of being a doctor either, for that matter. If we want to be brutally honest about it, I had no use for musicians or doctors yet when I was six years old. But teachers? They were everything.

My route to realizing this ambition was a circuitous one—any traditional path I might have taken was thwarted when I discovered hardcore, dropped out of high school, joined an Eastern religious cult, and later started a band that obsessed over Kennedy assassination theories, in that order and in a nutshell—but I always believed that I’d find my way back. In late 2007, I did. Sixteen years after dropping out, I was accepted into a competitive program that awarded its graduates with both a Bachelor’s degree and the certification to teach in New York City public schools. Somehow, I was actually going to do this.

After three years of coursework, I was finally offered a student teaching position at a secondary school in Brooklyn. By this point I was 36 years old, and it seemed like my life in hardcore had become more or less economically unviable. My last band, New End Original, had broken up without much fanfare and the idea of starting yet another band had lost all its appeal to me. Blogs and MySpace had taken over the publishing landscape and there didn’t seem to be room for the kind of writing I was interested in. But more than that, I was beginning to burn out on what felt like a seemingly “punk” notion that a fair financial compensation was not the reasonable outcome of one’s labor, but some sort of random byproduct that we shouldn’t expect. I believed that punk is about the passion, but I needed to find a living.

It took only one day before some of the other teachers at the school where I was placed began pulling me aside. Every day, a new warning. The first one was blunt, and as such, strikingly memorable: “You don’t really want to do this, do you?” The longer I stayed, the more detailed the warnings became. “We have no professional support,” they told me. “We spend our own money to give our students basic supplies and work countless unpaid hours in lesson-planning and grading.” More bleakly, one teacher simply said, “No one cares about us.”

At first, I went on undeterred. It sounds almost tragic to say this, but after years of working in the hardcore scene, I was actually quite used to making very little money for enormous amounts of labor. In some sort of perverse way, I may have even come to believe that I didn’t deserve more. 

In education, they call it “the teacher tax,” which is to say that teachers are simply expected to provide cheap labor because their work is also their passion or their vocation or even their calling. As a teacher, you are expected to take only what you can get and be grateful for it—even if your lot falls below one’s basic needs for compensation or professional support. (In many places in the country, it almost certainly does.) Show dissent and your fitness for teaching is questioned: How dare you ask for more! Do you even understand what a gift it is to be doing the important work of a teacher? It’s really quite the manipulative racket.

As several months went by, I saw many of these warnings come to life in real time. Everyone was struggling, and yet everyone also stood oddly resigned. The teacher tax had been crystallized into orthodoxy. Watching these dynamics play out in a different context, it occurred to me that this same logic has been used to take advantage of impassioned hardcore kids like me for as long as I can remember, and that there is also, in fact, such a thing as a “punk tax.” The punk tax is why I never fought with promoters when I knew that my band was being underpaid at a show; it’s why I never escalated a royalty dispute with a record label when I knew the accounting was off. Parallels were beginning to emerge, and the closer I got to getting that teacher certification, the more I realized that this kind of thinking is practically designed for abuse by unscrupulous people, whether you’re a teacher or a punk. The closer I got to getting that teacher certification, the more I felt like I was being set up to fail.

I graduated from that program, but I did not continue on the path it paved for me to work in the New York City public school system. Instead, I spent five years teaching at a public university before I finally gave up teaching altogether.

Keith Buckley, live with Many Eyes. Town Ballroom. Buffalo, NY. January 25, 2024. Photo by Fabiana Moreira.

II.

That so many hardcore kids might find the idea of teaching attractive shouldn’t be surprising. The same kind of idealism that drew us to hardcore lives inside of the core of educational optimism. We believe that the world is capable of changing, one person at a time. We believe that simple convictions can enact complex favorable results. We believe that work can be people-motivated and not necessarily cash-motivated. We believe in the potential and the power of youth. We also like to believe, whether we cop to it or not, that we know better. This sometimes unfounded belief might drive the hardcore-teacher connection most of all. For Keith Buckley, the former Every Time I Die singer who now fronts Many Eyes, becoming a teacher in the early 2000s—after completing a near-identical program to the one I took—was just one part of the logical conclusion that led him to hardcore in the first place.

“I just kind of always wanted to be a teacher,” he explains, as part of a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “I feel like the world needs more credible authorities. Like, when you’re a kid and you’re a straight-edge vegan—especially in the scene that I was growing up in, where everything was disinformation and everyone was lying to you—it was like, I’m sixteen years old and I’m worried about fluoride.” He laughs, then continues, “But if you can just have one node of authority to point you in the right direction, that can set off your entire life. My entire life was set off by this one [fur] protest I went to that probably got me into hardcore in general. There are these things we want when we’re young and we just don’t know how to get them. I felt like being a teacher was the best step.”

Like me, Keith’s practical experience as a teacher was short-lived. Soon after Every Time I Die took off, he made the decision to focus on his role as a singer. That decision certainly paid off. It’s not lost on me, however, that the archetype of a hardcore singer has also historically taken on teacher-like characteristics. We embraced H.R.’s doctrine of PMA, we looked to Ian MacKaye as a model of entrepreneurship, and in many cases, we actually read the syllabus of animal rights books that Ray Cappo recommended in the liner notes for We’re Not in This Alone. (For me, that last one was a life-changer.) Hardcore kids, including those of us who dropped out of school, can be endlessly curious people—and that makes us excellent learners. Not coincidentally, the Venn diagram between people who want to learn and people who think about teaching in some way is an almost-perfect circle.

Bryan Chu and Popeye Vogelsang with Farside, live at the Neil House. Columbus, OH. January 18, 1995. Photo by Steven Wade.

III.

I don’t want to give the impression that my failed experience with teaching is the norm because it’s not. Individual mileage varies, but there are countless punks and hardcore kids who have found a way to work in public education without succumbing to “the teacher tax.” Tim Redmond from Snapcase is a veteran high school teacher in Buffalo. Jay Petagine from Mindforce teaches high school in Poughkeepsie. Fiddlehead’s Pat Flynn is a full-time history teacher at a high school near Boston. Farside’s Bryan Chu spent decades as a middle-school teacher in Portland up until very recently. Even James Pligge from Harms Way teaches high school Physical Education in the Illinois suburbs when his schedule permits. If we count forms of alternative instruction—like the way Porcell teaches yoga or how Fugazi’s Joe Lally gives bass lessons—then we can certainly make the argument that hardcore has become a fertile ground for educators of all stripes. This is something we can all be proud of.

That said, I still think about the “tax” we pay for our passion, and I would still argue that this idea is toxic and prone to abuse—in the hardcore scene and otherwise. I think about how many gifted educators simply gave up on their aspirations in the face of that lack of support (at best) and harsh resistance (at worst). I wonder what anyone in public education is doing to address the fact that 43 percent of job listings for teachers are going unfulfilled and compensation is the number-one reason teachers quit their jobs. I also think about the hardcore bands that could never make it work—either because the punk tax never let them get ahead or because it made them feel like they weren’t worthy enough to continue—and how much poorer we are without them. There aren’t any statistics for that kind of thing, but rest assured, the numbers would be devastating.

So why did I survive in hardcore but walk away from teaching? I’ve only been able to come up with one operable theory: Whereas the educators I worked with paid their teacher tax while still feeling grossly underappreciated, I’ve been lucky enough to feel like much of what I’ve done in the hardcore scene is “important work” to a great number of people. That’s what keeps me moving. That’s what makes me persist. In spite of my beliefs as a child, I am incredibly relieved to discover that “important work” can look like this, too.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Keith Buckley of Many Eyes.

---

Anti-Matter is reader-supported. If you’ve valued reading this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and backing independent, ad-free hardcore media. Your support is crucial to Anti-Matter’s continuation and growth. Thank you, friends. ✨