Back to school with the best teacher gimmicks in WWE history

It's the beginning of the month for September, which means it's one of the most dreaded times of the year for many people: back to school.

Whether you're in high school or college, you have a kid in elementary school or you're a teacher yourself, it's very likely you're somehow affected by the end of summer and the transition into a new school year.

This isn't quite the same for WWE, where the Performance Center constantly has classes going on and the entire wrestling industry is a perpetual learning experience as even veterans can still pick up a few new tricks from younger students while passing on knowledge to the next generation.

There's one thing in WWE history, though, that hasn't gone over too well in regards to school, and that's the teacher gimmick.

As simple and basic as it is, surprisingly only a handful of Superstars have touched having characters built around being teachers or a close equivalent to it.

So as we raise our glasses in celebration to our kids getting out of the house for a while or we start to panic at how we'll deal with the upcoming school year, let's take a trip down memory lane and look back on those teacher gimmicks from WWE's past.

#1 Matt Striker

For many current fans, bringing up the idea of a teacher in WWE should immediately call back memories of Matt Striker above anybody else.

Before joining WWE, Matthew Kaye was a full-time high school teacher who would wrestle on his weekends, vacation time and even sick days.

This would naturally cause some strain on that profession and he would eventually resign from his teaching position to dedicate himself entirely to the wrestling industry, where WWE would pick him up in 2005.

Pretty much right off the bat, Striker would adopt a teacher gimmick where he would even have a promo segment of his own called Matt Striker's Classroom akin to Piper's Pit, Miz TV and The Peep Show to a certain extent.

This was a great addition to the ECW brand in particular as that show provided not only a good place to be a big fish in a small pond but also allowed him to feud with individuals like The Sandman who were clearly of the less intelligent variety, which made sense.

Eventually, Striker would start working more as an announcer and commentator, becoming more of a member of the broadcast team than an in-ring competitor, but he would still keep this teacher persona with him in some ways, often utilizing words that would sometimes feel sesquipedalian in nature (case in point) in comparison to the more basic sentence structure and vernacular of the traditional commentators.

Striker was the most recent true "teacher" in WWE, but there were others who came before him to set the stage.

#2 Michelle McCool

hot Michelle McCool teacher — I got it bad, got it bad, got it bad. I'm hot for teacher.

One of Michelle McCool's earliest gimmicks in WWE was that of a teacher, which, similar to Matt Striker's situation, drew inspiration from real life experiences.

Before she was in the business, she was a seventh-grade science teacher in Palatka, Florida, having earned her Master's degree in Educational Leadership from Florida State University.

She was following in the footsteps of other family members who had been in the education field as her mother (Mary) was a teacher and her father (Terry) was a superintendent.

When bringing this to her character in WWE, she was the only one of the bunch on this list to be able to capitalize on the "hot for teacher" archetype by wearing sexy schoolgirl outfits and tapping into a whole different genre of entertainment.

This came complete with puns against her opponents, like how she would "take them to school" and she would even have a tag team that she would manage dubbed The Teacher's Pets, which consisted of K.C. James and Idol Stevens—more on that latter name in the next section.

McCool was later repackaged and brought back as the on-screen partner of Chuck Palumbo, where she would play more of an "All-American Diva", dropping the teacher gimmick and allowing her to be less constricted with her character, which would open her up to the Lay-Cool duo which would end her career.

Certainly, McCool as a sexy teacher was different from the rest of the characters and while it may not be as memorable of a run as Striker's or some of the others, one look at the picture above will surely bring back some fun memories to those who were watching at the time.

#3 Damien Sandow

As part of The Teacher's Pets, Aaron Haddad was known as Idol Stevens and didn't quite make much of a mark on the professional wrestling industry.

Later, he would be repackaged—although not entirely from the ground up—and would re-debut under the name Damien Sandow.

While technically not a teacher in the most literal sense of the word, Sandow's character was very much inspired by the trope as he was essentially a man who knew he was smarter than everybody else and had no trouble passing that information along.

Sandow's vignettes would consist of him teaching a lesson in culture, etiquette and other high society intelligentsia topics while looking down his nose on everybody else.

This allowed him to adopt several nicknames such as The Enlightened One, The Beacon of Light in a Harbor of Inequity, The Lord of Literacy, and his most famously used moniker of The Intellectual Savior of the Masses.

To further drive home the point, when he and Cody Rhodes formed a tag team, they became known as The Rhodes Scholars.

Like anybody on their high horse, it's fun to see them be taken down a peg, which is what happened to Sandow eventually—too soon if you ask myself and many others, who wished to have seen him be successful in his failed Money in the Bank contract cash-in attempt.

Sandow would drop the change his gimmick to that of a parody artist and a stunt-double to The Miz named Damien Mizdow, which would carry him into the end of his tenure in WWE.

#4 The Genius Lanny Poffo

A predecessor of sorts to the Damien Sandow character as "The Genius" Lanny Poffo, formerly known as Leaping Lanny before he adopted the persona of an obnoxious heel with an intelligent edge.

The Genius sported an academic cap and gown akin to the standard graduation attire and had a penchant for poetry which actually became the most well-known trait of his career, which is why he would follow suit with a poem for his brother, Macho Man Randy Savage's Hall of Fame induction speech.

Like everybody else on this list, Poffo would continually berate his opponents and the crowd for being beneath him and not smart enough to match wits, despite how folks like Hulk Hogan would get the better of him in the end.

During his first vignette, he touted himself as the world's smartest man and specified that he could speak eleven languages—something Cesaro should be envious over.

In an era where there were simply bigger stars with more bombastic personas, Poffo fell by the wayside and would dissolve into relative obscurity while his allegiance with Mr Perfect would be transitioned into one between Curt Hennig and Bobby Heenan, which was much better in the long run and worth nixing Poffo from the roster.

#5 Dean Douglas

The final name to talk about on this list is Dean Douglas, better known as Shane Douglas to most wrestling fans.

For years, Douglas would bounce around between WCW and WWF, although most of his success came from ECW.

One of his attempts to make it big under Vince McMahon's control was with the Dean Douglas character where he was essentially a college dean combined with a teacher mixed with a sports coach.

His vignettes and promos would be dubbed The Report Card wherein he'd review matches and critique the wrestlers in them (normally the babyfaces more than anybody else) and eventually give them a failing grade of some sorts, such as IU for "innately unprepared" or MF for "miserable failure."

In one of the weirdest title changes in WWE history, Shawn Michaels would be forced to relinquish the Intercontinental Championship before his match against Douglas at In Your House: Great White North on October 22, 1995.

Douglas would be awarded the title by forfeit but would be forced to immediately defend it against Razor Ramon, who would promptly defeat him, taking the title away from him mere minutes later.

At roughly a dozen minutes long, this is still to this day the shortest Intercontinental Championship title reign in history and it was still the zenith of the Dean Douglas character, which is very sad in retrospect and not something to be proud of, even though he is nonetheless in the record books as a former Intercontinental champion, which is something nobody else on this list can claim.

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