Written by a teacher in America about her real experiences

1. Create a TikTok account. Preferably during the pandemic to keep yourself occupied. Watch as the algorithm melds itself to send you teacher video after teacher video, and then think to yourself, I could do that.
2. Begin making content. First, create video memes: follow the trends other creators are memeing, using sounds from Spongebob and RuPaul, borrowing songs from Taylor Swift and SNL to make thirty second videos about the difficulties of distance learning and the sadness of Zoom classrooms.
3. Decide to slowly shift into making original content. Look directly into the camera. You don’t know yet to avoid the Millennial pause, and you zoom in on your face which identifies you immediately as the cringey, amateur, 35-year-old creator that you are. Don’t care about being cringey: spout your hot takes about the education system online for strangers, because it helps get you through the day.
4. Go viral. Sit in your car and talk to your phone over the steering wheel about why distance learning is so hard for Gen Z. Get over half a million views, with hundreds of comments from teenagers lamenting the pandemic classrooms, thanking you for understanding. Gain 10k followers overnight.
5. Watch as your videos continue to go viral. Smile when your videos get stitched and duetted by verified content creators. Get interviewed by a popular podcaster about reasons behind teenage rage in the classroom post-distance learning. Feel finally validated as an educator. Feel your ever-present imposter syndrome start to fade.
6. Join a professional development (PD) with an antibias, antiracist focus, reading works like Linguistics Justice by Dr. April Baker-Bell. Let your heart sing: you’ve been trying to decolonize your classroom since the get-go. Decide your PD project will be to create a linguistics-based unit for your juniors, discussing some rules of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in leading up to reading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and writing an informative essay about character identity.
7. Grin as you watch your students get wholly invested in this unit. They love “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie so much that “single story” becomes a part of the classroom vernacular. Tell them not to cuss in class, and laugh when they respond, “I’m just code switching!”
8. Consider your options when the PD facilitators explain that you must present your research findings to the group. You can make a slideshow. You can write an essay. Or, you can make videos.
9. Create your series of seven videos on TikTok that cover your linguistics unit. Fail to see the potential pitfall in using phrases like “fighting white supremacy” and “grammar is arbitrary.”
10. Watch, in complete horror over your coffee on a Sunday morning, as the tidal wave of conservative hate fills your comments sections. Where is this coming from? you wonder. Read a comment that says, “Libs of TikTok will make sure you get fired,” and naively tilt your head: What’s that? 
11. Fall down the Twitter rabbit hole of hatred, because this anti-LGBT, transphobic, anti-educator Twitter platform has targeted your videos for being “woke.” Don’t eat that day; you can’t stop scrolling through the comments of people who say they will come for your job, come for your school, come for your life. We will find out which car is yours, and run you off the road!!!!!! ricochets around in your skull. Watch as they dox you, your home address posted to the cesspool of vitriol that is Libs of TikTok.
12. Reel again in horror as you read an email from a FOX News correspondent who wants to interview you for a piece on educator wokeness. Take deep breaths. Don’t respond.
13. Call your principal. She calls the superintendent. He calls the school board. They tell you to stop posting on TikTok and make your account private. Despite the trauma, feel a squeeze of sadness in your chest. The hate will stop, but so will the love.
14. Call the police, file a report.
15. Order a security system.
16. Read the FOX News article about you. Sit in shock, unable to process anything besides the fact that they literally chose the worst screenshots of you possible.
17. Watch as shitty celebrities like Jordan Peterson and Ann Coulter tweet about you.
18. Watch as you make TV. FOX News correspondent Harris Faulkner features you on The Faulkner Focus. She claims your videos say that students of color are too stupid to understand grammar. How could they get it so wrong? 
19. Read the hateful emails you receive at your school account, now that your TikTok has been made private. They call the district office. They call your principal. She asks you if you’re okay. Remind her that one email called you a “whore pig” that needs to be “slaughtered.”
20. Google yourself (you know you shouldn’t, but you can’t help it). Read the articles posted about you from journalists in England, Ireland, India. I didn’t know they cared about “wokeness” in India.
21. Hold tight to positivity. The student leader of the Black Student Union at your school visits to tell you he loved your videos. A Black educator in Texas emails to ask if you can friend her on TikTok, because she needs to see your content, needs to see that there are white allies out there.
22. Hold your breath as you watch the next school board meeting broadcasted live on your district’s YouTube channel. Parents, teachers, and community members line up at the podium to demand you be fired. The school board members respond with blank stares; the lawyers have coached them not to say anything. How come no one is standing up for you? your partner asks.
23. Continue showing up to work. Teach A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Teach Fences by August Wilson. Teach James Baldwin and MLK and Maya Angelou. I love reading about Black lives, a student tells you. The internet does what the internet does best: eventually, it moves on. The death threats stop. The emails cease.
24. Watch Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez lambast Libs of TikTok in a House committee meeting because their content instigated a bomb threat made on a children’s hospital for providing gender-affirming care. 
25. Thank students for their gifts. They’ve always given you random gifts, and they continue to. Smile at a stuffed animal goat holding a heart that says, “You’re the GOAT: Greatest of All Teachers,” and realize you haven’t thought about FOX News for several days.
26. Read dystopian literature in your spare time.
27. Plant a vegetable garden.
28. Adopt a dog.
29. Recognize that recovery will be a process.
30. Continue to feel inspired by teachers doing great work to advocate on TikTok for their students.