Molly Dugan, a teacher in the Kansas City area, recently made a TikTok sharing some of the blurted thoughts she’s heard in her eighth-grade classroom. She’s been keeping track.
Students critique her clothing, her love life, point out pimples on her face, once compared her to a dead bug on the floor — and complain about the toilet paper in school.
“Things that my 8th graders have said to me,” she said, introducing the video in a serious, teacher voice. She held a notebook and checked each hysterical, cringey, awkward one-liner off a list after reading them deadpan.
“Are you in therapy? You seem like the type.”
“You look like my grandpa’s couch.”
“Your pants look like trash bags sewn together. Ha ha. Trash bag pants.”
“I don’t get why you write so much on my rough draft. I’m not reading all that, bruh. For real for real.”
“Fat a** alert.”
She paused.
“That one ended up being about me. I was eating some crackers.”
She continued.
“Miss Dugan, you don’t want to know what I say about you behind your back or you’d quit your job.”
“And finally, how does it feel to be the only unmarried teacher in this school?”
“Thank you,” she said, ending the video.
As of this week the first TikTok from May 16 has been watched more than 15 million times. Three follow-up videos have been seen in total more than 5 million times.
“It’s so crazy,” Dugan, who just finished her fifth year of teaching, told The Star. “This was my very first video I ever put on TikTok. Ever. So this all has been very unexpected.”
The videos quote her middle-school English students in Miami County south of Overland Park. Next school year she’ll teach language arts to sophomores and juniors at Blue Valley North High School.
She had watched similar teacher TikToks — “I can’t really take credit for this, a lot of teachers do this” — and she knew she had enough fodder to make her own.
Before she went public she ran the idea past her principals and teaching mentors, who told her what she already knew. Be professional. Don’t name students. Don’t show it during school hours. She chose not to name the school.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh I have so many things to say,’” she said. “So I thought I should just post it. So I did. And it just blew up. And so here we are.
“I don’t know what made mine blow up, what made it stand out. I am also going to give credit to my students. They say the darndest things.”
She might have been new to TikTok, but her students weren’t. They quickly found that first video, which hit 1 million views on a school day.
She panicked.
“My students were going crazy that day. I was freaking out,” Dugan said. “I was like, oh my gosh … the kids aren’t paying attention in class and it’s all my fault. What do I do? Do I need to go and delete this? Is this going to be a problem? I didn’t want this to ruin my career.
“I had a little bit of anxiety. So it was a little bit of a scare before it was exciting.”
‘You’re giving single core’
Given the obvious interest, she posted a second round of “things that my 8th-graders have said” on May 18.
“Why do you smile like that?”
“What is that black stuff on your eye? Are you OK? It was there the other day, too.”
It was her eye shadow.
One day she told students her childhood dog had run away from home and hadn’t returned.
“Their response was womp womp,” she said.
She shared more.
“I thought only boys had hormones.”
“That kid glazed me at a D1 level. He was first-round pick in the glazing draft.”
“You’re giving single core.”
She had been keeping track of the quips in a phone app. “But the ones in that first video were truly just off the top of my head because they were that memorable,” she said. “I often will come home, I live with roommates, and I’ll tell them, ‘oh you won’t believe what a kid said today.’”
‘You have a pimple on your chin’
On her first video, Dugan quoted comedian John Mulvaney in the caption: “8th-graders will make fun of you but in an accurate way.”
“I never related to something more,” she told The Star. “Sometimes they say it and they don’t know that they’re insulting you but they kinda do. That’s the beauty of middle school, they’re such a blend of elementary and high school.
“They know they’re saying something mean but they didn’t mean it in a bad way. Like when the kid said, ‘You have a pimple on your chin, I don’t mean it in a bad way, though.’
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but maybe don’t tell me about it. I know it’s there.”
When a student zings her she tries to “stay very stone cold. They don’t get to know that bothered me. I mean, it’s that age where they kinda want a reaction,” she said. “So it’s, ‘Oh, you think that’s the meanest thing I’ve ever heard?’ I’m secure within myself.”
But when she thinks a student has crossed over to bullying, “I will say to them, ‘That was a really mean thing to say,’” she said. “And they’ll try to be like whatever. But sometimes I will pull them aside and tell them you really shouldn’t talk to people like that. And they’ll usually (say), oh I’m sorry.
“A lot of times it’s life lessons they need to learn that hey, I’m going to be OK but be wary about how you talk to people. Sometimes I’ll add on and poke fun at myself, too, so it just depends on the nature of what was said.”
She took care not to post comments students made to each other.
“I don’t think I would ever use content from a situation that I thought was bigger than comedic relief, especially if it was something a student said to another student,” she said.
‘A little comedic relief’
Middle-school darts are one thing. But when people began making mean comments about her students — and their parents — on the TikToks, “the teacher side of me started coming out,” she said, though she resisted engaging with critics.
A common reaction: I can’t believe kids these days. I would have never talked to my teachers that way.
“All these people are quick to say, oh this generation is going to doom us. And I just wanted to look at all those people and say, let’s go back and listen to what you said in eighth grade … and the thing is I’m saying these in a certain context.”
Example: She quoted one student who got an answer right in class and exclaimed: “Yuh, I felt that one in my nuggets.”
“Truly he let an intrusive thought out, and that kid is funny, he’s a class clown,” she said. “He said it, I kinda looked at him and he said, ‘Oh my God I didn’t mean to say that out loud.’ And then he started laughing at himself. And it was just a funny moment for the whole class.”
She said maybe her students “speak more out of pocket” than older generations.
“But at the same time that doesn’t mean that they don’t have incredible potential to be great human beings, just like I made some crazy mistakes in eighth grade,” she said.
“I fully believe that my students are really great at heart. The purpose was not to roast my students or put them on blast, rather than just to give people a little comedic relief.
“And at the end of the day I’m very overwhelmed by how much positive feedback I’ve gotten. And I’m really thankful for that. I think that even though I didn’t expect it to blow up, you’re still putting yourself out there for criticism, and I’m thankful I’ve had so many people support it and support teachers through it and say man, teachers have a hard job.”
She sees a lot of her own awkward, “late bloomer” self in her students. She was a middle-schooler who let her thoughts fly and who thought she looked cute using a ton of black eyeliner when in reality she “had raccoon eyes.”
“It’s just so funny I can relate to that. I just have such a soft spot for these kids,” she said.
Even today, she said, she’s usually the first one in her classrooms to embarrass herself. There is a TikTok coming about that. She’s already posted a video showing all her teacher clothes her students have mocked.
On the first day of school last year she ripped her blouse. No one told her.
“I accidentally Hulked out of the shoulders of my shirt and I didn’t know it,” she said. “All day my shirt was ripped and I had no idea. And when I figured it out at the end of the day I looked at them and (asked) why didn’t anyone tell me?
“And they said well, we didn’t know if it was supposed to be like that.”
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