Many students have approached Joe Sloma over the past five years, asking the teacher about his secondary job: making TikToks. To these inquiries, Sloma said he brushes them off with a sarcastic comment but 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
“I mostly just wanted to see what it would take to go viral,” Sloma said. “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.”…