Many students have approached College of Education alumnus Joe Sloma, (MAT, '14) over the past five years, asking the teacher about his secondary job: making TikToks. Sloma says though he brushes off these inquires with a sarcastic comment, he doesn’t hide his massive following from his students.
The Iowa City High School English teacher, or @squirehaligast, has amassed 1.5 million TikTok followers since he started making videos out of boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic and has made a name for himself among the “TeacherTok” community.
“I mostly just wanted to see what it would take to go viral,” Sloma says. “There is a strange kind of addiction once you have something successful. There’s like a rush of creating something and knowing that people like it and wanting to replicate that.”
The Des Moines native’s videos consist of skits he writes about different students discussing a topic with their teacher. He plays all the roles, putting on a different hoodie or button-down to differentiate between characters.