The TikTok Teacher
Tadhg O'Donovan, a science teacher from Bandon, returned home from England in the pandemic. He brought with him a small bit of a following.
A few days into his first week teaching at Carrigaline Community School, Tadhg O’Donovan ceded the classroom floor to a sixth year student who had his hand raised.
‘Sir, just a quick one,” the student asked. “Are you on TikTok?”
“And that was it, I’d been discovered,” Tadhg, 29, told me in one of the science labs of the secondary school recently.
He was ‘outed’ around the tail end of 2020 when he was filling in as the dreaded/poor substitute teacher. The University of Limerick graduate had returned from England that summer, having spent five years as a science teacher in secondary schools in and around Watford, north west of London.
The Bandon native didn’t set out to become a TikTokker, but the pandemic changed teaching.
A few months into the first lockdown, Tadhg was on the doorstep of the house of one of his students in Rickmansworth north of London when the penny dropped.
Schools had been shut for a few months and learning and teaching had moved completely online. Or it had, but students hadn’t followed suit.
“I don’t have the motivation to go onto Google Classroom, but I’m on my phone watching these TikToks forever,” the student explained to Tadhg.
And so Tadhg thought, “I’m going to make a couple of TikToks and if I turn up on their feed it’ll remind them that school is still here, so I did it almost just to annoy them.”
And thus began the meteoric TikTok career of Teach with Tadhg, who, between his two accounts on the video sharing app has nearly half a million followers.
Before that “eureka moment” on the doorstep, O’Donovan had never made a TikTok video. As a secondary school teacher he was well aware of the hugely popular app from Bytedance, a Chinese tech company, which has grown to more than one billion users in just over five years.
But there’s another reason besides that headline figure why tech companies such as Meta and Google are looking over their shoulder at TikTok and it’s one that Tadhg’s student referenced directly: TikTok users are “forever” on their phone watching TikToks.
You could lose hours on a daily basis on the app which serves up a constant stream of short videos that covers everything from DuaLipa smiling in a dance, two men riding a swan boat, boyfriends pranking girlfriends and vice versa, influencers giving stuff away, and just about everybody lip-syncing and/or dancing. Or both. And that’s not even 0.000000004 per cent of TikTok.
The way O’Donovan saw it though was that his lessons over on Google Classroom were losing out to TikTok.
“I almost got annoyed,” Tadhg told me in the science lab of Carrigaline Community School where he has been teaching since 2020, while recalling how he got into TikTok.
“And we (teachers) were all having the same issue,” he said. “None of the kids were logging on to Google Classroom. We were like ‘how are are we going to get them back over here?’
And so Tadhg’s idea was to go to where the students are: TikTok.
Becoming TikTok Tadhg
In the pandemic everything was served to us digitally and Tahdg thinks that without a doubt “remote learning widened the gap between the top and the bottom.”
“School is the great equaliser,”he said. “If everyone walks into a class they’ve got the equal chance of learning.”
But with school off limits and a lot of the structure for teaching and learning thrown out the window, many students suffered. As part of the school’s outreach program Tadhg sometimes dropped by his student’s homes while schools were closed and it gave him a hitherto unseen glance into their lives outside the classroom and the school.
“When you actually go to their houses and see what their background is and what their daily struggles are, or even how they’re studying, or what devices they have available it really gives you an eyeopener of how disadvantaged some kids are versus others.”
So Tadhg thought, if TikTok is where they are, then “that’s probably where we need to be going.”
“Go where the kids are, not force them to come to us, so that’s how I got started.”
Initially, Tadhg’s goal was just to turn up on their feed, specifically on their “FYP” (For You Page), which is akin to the front page of a digital newspaper, except this one that can draw from hundreds of millions of stories. Crack that algorithm and you’re getting viewed (and the potential to be liked and shared) by a massive global audience.
Somehow, some of Tadhg's first attempts on TikTok found their way to his students and they started emailing him on his school email address telling him that he had turned up on his FYP. The novelty of seeing one of their teachers in their school in one of their classrooms likely drew them in.
“Weirdly it pulled more kids back in and I thought ‘if this is how it’s done maybe I should put some science stuff up.”
And so that’s how he hit on the other part of his TikTok persona, the educator.
Let me entertain and teach you
Mainly though Tadhg is an entertainer on TikTok. And that’s by and large why hundreds of millions of people tune into TikTok on a daily basis, devoting massive chunks of time: to be entertained.
Tadhg’s shtick is he makes these bite-size videos of relatable school content. And I mean bite-size: think in and around five to ten seconds. The premise is he’s the student, or the teacher, or both.
Up until he made his first video he was a novice on TikTok. He knew about the app - what secondary school teacher anywhere in the world could reasonably claim they don’t at least know the name? - but he didn’t have an account and so he relied on his housemates to help with the initial videos.
“It was pretty straightforward, my housemates helped me, we had a bit of a laugh and they taught me a few bits and bobs, but it was really just trial and error.”
“You learn fairly quickly the more effort you put into it the less success you actually have,” he says laughing. And success is, like all things on social media (and journalism), garnered on numbers: the number of views, comments, shares etc.
“I think that’s what they actually notice (that) if you try too hard, whereas if you’re having a laugh and a joke they’ll watch it,” he says.
For example, one of his most watched videos features a teacher (Tadhg), and two different students (also Tadhg). The set-up is that the teacher and the straight-A student have both arrived at different answers to the same problem. The camera cuts to the other student (again Tadhg), looking out the window wondering if Lightning McQueen from the movie Cars has life insurance or car insurance.
That’s it.
This is all done without speaking parts (TikTok is big on text), and with only the sound of a clock ticking in the background. Would this super short sketch find a slot in a sketch show on RTÉ? Doubtful. (Would anyone even watch it on RTÉ?) But, the roughly 10 second clip has 5 million views on TikTok.
Tadhg’s most viewed TikTok is lip-synced to a song from a more famous TikToker in which Tadhg plays a teacher dropping by the classroom of another teacher to ask if he can “steal a student”. That one has more than seven million views.
It’s clear that Tadhg relishes the performance and TikTok more than any other app has the greatest array of broadcast tools and wizardry available including a green screen and endless songs and effects and everything you ever needed to become a one-person Hollywood studio.
Tadhg has made over a hundred videos in nearly two years on TikTok, not all of them are massive hits - most aren’t - but by the time he moved back to Cork in the summer of 2020 and was looking for work as a secondary school science teacher he had established himself on the app. (He also has a large following on Instagram, where he reposts his TikTok videos).
Back in Cork he was eager to return to a classroom, but it wasn’t until the tailend of 2020 before his paperwork was approved by the teaching council. In the interim he started up a page on TikTok teaching live science lessons.
Eager is one adjective you would definitely use to describe Tadhg (you could probably extend this to most social influencers).
“I’ve got this degree, I’m dying to get back into the classroom so I might as well use it to help the kids that need it so I started teaching on TikTok twice a week,” he told me.
Generally, those lessons cover biology and chemistry, but Tadhg tries to be accommodating. However, since he’s back teaching full-time, the live lessons have dropped down to once a week, or when he can fit them in.
Back in the classroom
At the start of December 2020, Tadhg started his teaching career in Ireland. He was asked to do two weeks of subbing in Carrigaline Community School.
“I probably caught them off guard a little,” Tadhg says, explaining that he came in the day before he was due to start to see if he could link up with the teacher he was replacing and talk things over.
To which the staff at Carrigaline told him more or less to slow down, relax, everything was in order, he wasn’t needed until the following day.
“Now I’m learning to relax again as a teacher and enjoy teaching.” In our interview in the science lab he outlined that the work rate in the UK for teachers, bordering on burnout, was also one of the major reasons for returning home to teach in Ireland.
That first day he dropped by Carrigaline Community School before he was due to start teaching, he also mentioned to the principal that he had a bit of a digital following.
The school was fine with it and a few days into his short tenure, he was asked to stay on through to the summer of 2021 as a resource teacher.
As a resource teacher he’s able to dedicate more time on a one to one basis with students. A lot of that is teaching, but sometimes it’s being a role model or offering guidance.
“Every so often a student might come to me and they might not be in a great place mentally. To go, ‘let’s forget about that conversation, let's go talk about science instead doesn’t really make sense,” he says.
“That’s when you push the books aside,” he adds.
While Tadhg might be one of the biggest teachers on TikTok in Ireland, the students in Carrigaline take it in their stride, he says. Walking around the school corridors with Tadhg, you certainly don’t feel like you're in the presence of TikTok royalty based on student reactions, or lack of them.
When he does get attention, it generally comes from other schools when he’s away with the rugby team.
“The rugby lads (in CCS) find it hilarious. We might go on a blitz someday and there’ll be five or six other schools there. The lads are just used to me in class or out on the pitch. I’m just another teacher to them.”
But when they meet up with other schools word quickly gets out and the whispers start up:
“Is that teacher Tadhg? That’s teacher Tadhg, is it?” To which the Carrigaline Community Students “will be wetting themselves”.
His students are like, ‘it’s not even that ‘our teacher’s famous, it’s more like that he’s an eejit, don’t mind him.”
“The first years still have a fascination,” he says, but the older students don’t care. “They’ve no interest in it.”
For now Tadhg is still the only teacher in CCS on TikTok, but he says some other teachers have taken their own digital path, either with podcasts or Instagram creating content about what they teach.
“It’s great because it’s a sign that a lot of educators are realising you can use these platforms to actually benefit the students as well.”
It’s also great for the platforms and the advertisers and the social influencers. The Economist recently reported that spending on influencers by brands could reach $16 billion this year. Tadhg is signed to a talent agency in Dublin and he’s done a few paid promotional videos for AIB, UL and publicjobs.ie. TikTok also have a “Creator Fund” whereby followers can donate directly to their favourite TikTokkers but it’s not available yet in Ireland.
Before signing up with the talent agency, Tadhg had been approached by individual brands for promotional tie-ups, but he admits he felt conflicted.
In the end he decided to get on board, but he would only do promotions that tied into education. “I’m not going to sign up to push men’s hair gel, even though I would be little bit into the fashion side of things,” he said.
Tadhg told me that “most normal creators here are just making content because we enjoy it. That’s what I do it for and anything after that is a bonus.”
Down the line he says he’ll see if the school might build a TikTok account (they’re on Twitter) and do different things on it.
A memeologist
Memes are, to use a science metaphor, the atoms that bind TikTok videos together. More broadly, on social media memes are a universal form of understanding and language. Tadhg digs memes and mines them for his videos.
“I would have always been a bit of a memeologist,'' he says. Even before he got on TikTok he used memes in his lessons. “If I can make a meme that’s linked to whatever topic I’m teaching in science, I’m putting it in there.”
As he says, students are in tune with them, and memes act as a bit of a hook to pull them back into the lesson.
“If they don’t get the meme, then I’m going ‘I didn’t teach that lesson very well.”
Tadhg takes an expansive view of TikTok. “Every generation has their social media,” he says.
He’s a nineties baby and, as he says, many of his peers “still live on Instagram”.
“We look at TikTok and we think that’s a kid’s app, and we look at Facebook and think that’s for old people, you know.”
At some stage something else will come along he says.
Tadhg says he “really loves the acting side of things. “It’s a bit of craic,” he adds.
“I kind of forget that everyone can see the videos,” he jokes.
Teachers and students will stop him sometimes and ask him if such and such a character is based on a particular student, but he’s quick to say no character is ever based on an individual student.
The comments under his videos though show that his school characters are universally understood.
Between teaching, coaching, TikTok videos, live lessons and traveling up and down to Offaly - his girlfriend Chelsea Henchy (or Chelsea1302 as he introduces her) is also an influencer and they host a podcast together - most weeks are choc-a-bloc, but Tadhg says that he tries to moderate his screen time.
“Everyone assumes because I make content that I’m always on there, but that’s not the case,” he says. He does though find time to reply to nearly all the comments that come his way.
As to what his mother and father think of their son the TikTok teacher, he says his Dad thought for a long time ‘ah this is a phase, and you’ll get over it.”
“He’s got no interest in technology” Tadhg said of his father.
His mother set up a TikTok account when he had moved back home and was doing live lessons as she wanted to see what he was doing.
“I’d get a text message after saying ‘Dad’s actually sitting here watching this as well writing little notes because he wants to ask you something as well.”
He says that’s when they realised that he wasn’t just making silly videos online and that there’s value to it.
