A Michigan choir teacher and her young students are going viral after a video of them singing a made-up song featuring Generation Alpha slang racked up over 3.6 million views on TikTok.
Taryn Gontjes, a choir director at Cityside Middle School in Zeeland, shared the TikTok video that shows her playing a piano and directing students before they all start to sing together.
The original song idea came to Gontjes after she decided she wouldn’t discipline her sixth-, seventh- or eighth-graders for using slang constantly.
“The slang is just really big right now, and 6-7, it’s just a huge thing. Literally, every kid is saying it,” Gontjes told ABC News. “Some teachers have banned it from their classrooms just because they’re so tired of hearing it all the time. But I just decided that wasn’t a battle that I wanted to fight. And so, I thought, ‘Why not just make it part of what we do and have fun with it and embrace it?’”
Gontjes estimated it took her sixth-graders about 15 minutes to come up with the final, collaborative song “on the fly,” part of a warm-up exercise.
“I just said one day, ‘OK, we’re gonna work together and we’re gonna make a brain-rot version of it,’” Gontjes recalled. “And they thought it was just the coolest thing ever because an adult who’s not using this slang all the time is encouraging it rather than banning it.”
Gontjes’ video has since received nearly 4,000 comments, many with positive reactions.