+
upworthy
Pop Culture

Harry Styles heard his 'first teacher' was in the audience, so he stopped a show to find her

She taught him when he was 4.

harry styles, harry styles teacher, harry styles manchester

Harry Styles in 2013.

The impact teachers have on our lives lasts a lifetime. Even though most schoolteachers instruct countless children throughout their careers, they remember how the students affected their lives, too. A perfect example of this is the exchange between pop megastar Harry Styles and his first teacher from primary school on June 15.

Between songs at his concert at Emirates Old Trafford stadium in Manchester, England, Styles stopped the show to find someone in the audience. It was no easy task, there were 74,000 people at the show.

"I'm going to ask a favor from you because I'd like to try and find someone in the audience," he said, according to CBS News. It was his “first-ever schoolteacher” Ann Vernon. The gig was a homecoming for Styles, who grew up in nearby Cheshire, and he was told that some of his former schoolteachers may be in attendance.


Styles scanned the massive crowd for Vernon until he saw someone he thought was her. Unfortunately, it was her colleague, Mrs. Bailey.

"How are you? I heard you're retiring,” he called out to the person he thought was Vernon. “I'd just like to thank you for everything in those formative years. And yeah, thank you so much, it means a lot to me that you're here tonight."

"Can you imagine dealing with me when I was 4?" Styles joked. He then dedicated his next song, “Canyon Moon,” to his former teacher.

Even though Vernon wasn’t at the gig, she got Styles' touching message. Bailey called her and shared a clip of the exchange. After the concert, Vernon appeared on "The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show" on BBC Radio 2 to talk about what it was like teaching young Styles.

"As a teacher, you remember all of the children that you've taught, all of them are amazing in their own way," Vernon said. “Harry obviously has gone on to mega, mega things—everybody at Hermitage is just so, so proud of him." She recalled that he was a “delight” and that he had “a cheeky sparkle in his eye, he was a little bit of a tinker some of the time but he was a character so that's for sure, we all remember him.”

A big part of Styles' appeal is that he’s a nice guy who will "take a walk on a Sunday through the afternoon" with you. Some might have thought that it’s just an image he’s trying to sell the world, but it’s pretty easy to believe it’s true after seeing him stop a show to salute one of his teachers.

He was also gracious to his audience whom he thanked for coming to a show near where he grew up.

“This is an absolute pleasure to be here at my home show, I cannot begin to tell you how much it means to me to play here tonight and all of you for coming,” he said, according to Yahoo News UK.

“Some of the happiest times of my entire life have been making these last couple of albums, and some of the happiest times of my life have been right around the corner from here. So it feels pretty perfect to me playing these songs to you here tonight,” he added.

Community

How to end hunger, according to the people who face it daily

Here’s what people facing food insecurity want you to know about solving the hunger problem in America

True

Even though America is the world’s wealthiest nation, about 1 in 6 of our neighbors turned to food banks and community programs in order to feed themselves and their families last year. Think about it: More than 9 million children faced hunger in 2021 (1 in 8 children).

In order to solve a problem, we must first understand it. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released its second annual Elevating Voices: Insights Report and turned to the experts—people experiencing hunger—to find out how this issue can be solved once and for all.

Here are the four most important things people facing hunger want you to know.

Keep ReadingShow less

A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo via Canva, @WhattheADHD/Twitter

The 'bionic reading' font is designed to help keep you focused and read faster.

Reading is a fundamental tool of learning for most people, which is why it's one of the first things kids learn in school and why nations set literacy goals.

But even those of us who are able to read fluently might sometimes struggle with the act of reading itself. Perhaps we don't read as quickly as we wish we could or maybe our minds wander as our eyes move across the words. Sometimes we get to the end of a paragraph and realize we didn't retain anything we just read.

People with focus or attention issues can struggle with reading, despite having no actual reading disabilities. It can be extremely frustrating to want to read something and have no issues with understanding the material, yet be unable to keep your mind engaged with the text long enough to get "into" what you're reading.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pets

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

Keep ReadingShow less

Only child asks her friends what it's like to grow up with siblings.

Ahhh, siblings. Sometimes they're your best friends and other times your living room turns into an MMA octagon over the remote control. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be an only child. (That's not to say you didn't dream about it when your sister stole your favorite shirt for the 30th time.)

But not everyone has siblings, so it can be equally as hard for someone who grew up as an only child to picture what it would be like to have them. Only children also likely had moments where they dreamt of having a little brother or sister, not realizing the literal torment siblings can inflict on each other.

TikTok creator Lonnie IIV recently posted a video of himself with two other friends seemingly out to lunch, when the girl in the group asked what it was like to grow up with siblings. In less than a minute she realized she lucked out being an only child because her two guy friends gave her a crash course in sibling behavior.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo: courtesy BioCarbon Engineering/WikiCommons

Technology is the single greatest contributor to climate change but it may also soon be used to offset the damage we've done to our planet since the Industrial Age began.

In September 2018, a project in Myanmar used drones to fire "seed missiles" into remote areas of the country where trees were not growing. Less than a year later, thousands of those seed missiles have sprouted into 20-inch mangrove saplings that could literally be a case study in how technology can be used to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.

Keep ReadingShow less
Health

Artists got fed up with these 'anti-homeless spikes.' So they made them a bit more ... comfy.

"Our moral compass is skewed if we think things like this are acceptable."

Photo courtesy of CC BY-ND, Immo Klink and Marco Godoy

Spikes line the concrete to prevent sleeping.


These are called "anti-homeless spikes." They're about as friendly as they sound.

As you may have guessed, they're intended to deter people who are homeless from sitting or sleeping on that concrete step. And yeah, they're pretty awful.

The spikes are a prime example of how cities design spaces to keep homeless people away.

Keep ReadingShow less