Elementary school gym teacher and now Missouri Teacher of the Year Darrion Cockrell is a modern-day Prince Hal.

In the two Henry IV plays, Hal, who later becomes Henry V, is depicted as a wastrel and ne’er-do-well unsuited to the crown that awaits him. His closest friend is the infamous Falstaff, and the two spend their time trading insults, carousing with drinking buddies, and even planning robberies from their headquarters in the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, London (sack is wine; capons here are cooked chickens; bawds are pimps; leaping-houses are brothels; and Diana is the goddess of the moon; prologue to an egg and butter refers to saying grace, and Falstaff is making a pun about Hal also lacking grace):

Falstaff. Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?

Henry V. Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack
and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon
benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to
demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know.
What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the
day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes
capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the
signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself
a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no
reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand
the time of the day.”

Falstaff: “Indeed, you come near me now, Hal; for we that take
purses go by the moon and the seven stars,… And,
I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art king, as, God
save thy grace,—majesty I should say, for grace
thou wilt have none,—”

Hal: “What, none?”

Falstaff: “No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to
prologue to an egg and butter.”

Hal: “Well, how then? come, roundly, roundly.”

Falstaff: “Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not
us that are squires of the night’s body be called
thieves of the day’s beauty: let us be Diana’s
foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the
moon; and let men say we be men of good government,
being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and
chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.”

While Prince Hal was slumming in Eastcheap, Darrion Cockrell passed his childhood in an actual slum. He detailed his upbringing in his acceptance speech in October: “I was born to a drug-addicted mother who had two of her six kids by the age of 16. My father was murdered when I was four, and I began my journey in and out of the foster care system not long after my sixth birthday.” It wasn’t a surprise that he wound up in a gang, specifically, as he described it, “Six-deuce-87 Kitchen Crip gangster. Yup, your 2021 Teacher of the Year used to be in a gang,” 

So was Prince Hal, but with far less of an excuse. When the Prince is later and at last alone on stage, he explains to the audience the method to his madcap behavior (will uphold means will tolerate; unyoked humour means unbridled expression):

Prince Hal: “I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.”

While Hal plans to reform himself as a sort of surprise to the kingdom, Mr. Cockrell’s reformation was more hard-won, and worthy of being even more wonder’d at. Prince Hal goes on, speaking again for both himself and for the inspiring Mr. Cockrell:

Hal: “And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.”