When the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools in March, students and teachers were forced to “do” school from their homes. At the time, TikTok had been on the App Store in the US for two years, and kids, teens, and adults turned to it while they were self-isolating.
For Bryan Elementary’s fifth grade teacher Josh Monroe, he turned to TikTok to keep his students attending and engaged in Zoom lessons. With the help of his fellow fifth grade teachers, Mr. Henry and Mrs. Rogers, and his adorable dog, Nala, Monroe created fun videos to show students when they logged in.
“Especially after COVID, I didn’t realise how much I took for granted about just coming into the classroom every day,” Monroe said.
Now, Monroe’s TikTok account, @mrmonroeandnala, which was originally private and only intended for his class, reaches more than just his students and he has 628.4K followers.
Monroe’s dog Nala is a six-year-old Westie. She is a certified therapy dog, and she spends three days a week in the classroom with students. During his plan periods, Monroe takes Nala to visit other students in different classrooms.
“I go to the resource room, and if a kid’s having a hard day, they come to my class and hang out with Nala for a while,” Monroe said.
“One day I was thinking, ‘I should make my account public.’ So I did, and I made some stupid dancing video where I was just thanking teachers for all that they do, and it got up around 100 thousand views, and so then I was like ‘I’ll keep doing this,’ and it’s just gone from there.”
While scrolling through TikTok one day, Monroe came across a point-of-view (POV) video of a teacher coming up to a sleeping student, tapping on the desk and saying, “I’m tired, you’re tired, it’s time to wake up and work,” then walking away.
“You know, I get where he’s coming from, but at the same time, that’s not how your initial response should be to a student who’s sleeping,” Monroe said.
Monroe decided to create a POV video in response to the video previously mentioned. In it, he comes up to the student’s desk, asks them what’s going on, and then takes them aside to take a short nap with Nala. The video blew up almost immediately. As his most popular, the video currently has 9.5M views, 2.7M likes, and 21.6K shares.
Making TikToks hasn’t been easy for Monroe, however. His account has been banned a couple of times.
“At that point I was kind of embarrassed, because it popped up and said that I had violated community guidelines,” he said. “For about four days, I contemplated making a video that said, ‘I don’t know why I was banned, you can go through all of my content, I haven’t done anything wrong, but I’m done with TikTok, because this is embarrassing to me, and I’m not going to do it again.’”
When asked whether he had a purpose for his TikTok, Monroe responded, “I don’t think it started out with a mission or a goal. It just started out as a way to get kids on Zoom… But I guess, yeah, my mission kind of did develop into showing people how much teachers care.”
