Test anxiousness caused Sarah Ashley Winans to awaken in the middle of the night. She wasn’t scheduled to take the state exam, though. It would be administered by her, a middle school teacher.
On April 23, Winans, an Eastman, Georgia, teacher, posted a video of herself realizing she had forgotten to plug in her computer cart the day before her sixth-grade class was scheduled to take a state exam. The video went viral.
“You’re probably going to laugh. I was in bed. I was, like, dead asleep, and for some reason, I just woke up, and I sat up straight in the bed, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I did not plug this Chromebook cart in,’” she stated.
She remembers disconnecting the computer cart for a pencil sharpener because her classroom lacks many outlets in order to ensure she had an ample supply of No. 2 pencils before the state exams. However, she never replugged the cart.
Winans got out of bed at approximately 10:15 p.m. on April 21, put on her shoes, got her car keys, and texted the administration of her school.
Within minutes of picking up the building’s keys, she was moving through her middle school’s hallways while still wearing her pajamas and hair hat. Winans claims she “didn’t even think to put on clothes” because she lived only five minutes from the school.
She went to her classroom when she got to school, plugged in the cart (yes, it was disconnected), and left for home because she couldn’t sleep again.
“Nobody was shocked,” she quips when she tells her fellow educators.
“I’m the sixth grade chair person, and I coach cheerleading, and I own a dance studio. I do a bunch of different things, so I’m kind of just like, I have so many irons in the fire,” she laughs. “So I can forget kind of easily sometimes.”
She asked her administrator if she could view the footage after later realizing how many surveillance cameras were at her school.
“She let me look at it, and then I said, ‘I have to record it,’” Winans remembers.
The instructor, dressed in pajamas, slides, and a bonnet, is seen exiting her car just outside the entrance and making her way through the hallways before reaching her classroom in the now-viral video that Winans posted to TikTok. She gives the camera a peace sign as she leaves.
Over the video, which as of April 28 has over 13 million views and 2 million likes, she commented, “POV: You forgot to plug in your Chromebook cart and state testing starts tomorrow.”
She quickly had a viral video after setting the film to the Hannah Montana song “This Is the Life,” which was, she claims, the first song TikTok recommended to go with the video.
Winans added, “Test taking anxiety isn’t just for the kids. Mind you…this was at 10:15 p.m.”
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Winans claims that she “definitely” woke up in the middle of the night due to her pre-test anxiety. Being anxious for her kids is a part of her job as a teacher, she adds, “because I don’t want them to be nervous.”
“I don’t really sleep the week of testing, because I want them to be OK, and I want them to feel confident, not to be nervous and worried,” she said. “I know testing can really put a lot of pressure on people.”
Winans claims that the amount of attention the video has gotten has surprised her.
“This is just something we do. Teachers, you make mistakes, and you forget to do things and, I mean, you just do what you have to do to make sure your kids are successful,” she stated. “And I just was doing my job.”
