A science teacher has gone viral on TikTok for banning Gen Z slang like “aura” and “pookie” in her classroom to encourage her students to “be better.”
Nowadays, it can be hard to keep up with all the different slang terms and phrases used by different age ranges, particularly across TikTok and other social media apps.
It’s become even more tricky to decipher slang given that Gen Z has completely changed the meaning of words such as “bop” and transformed them into whole new expressions.
To combat the ever-growing list of Gen Z slang and encourage her students to sound “more educated,” Florida science teacher Angela Santalo decided to ban many different Gen Z slang terms in her classroom, including “pookie,” “aura,” “bro,” and “womp womp.”
Santalo shared her new classroom rule on TikTok and captioned the post, “Words that are forbidden in my class after hearing them a million times.”
The video, which has amassed over 3.3 million views, showcased Santalo outlining all the different slang words that will now be “forbidden” from her classroom via a PowerPoint presentation.
“I am nobody’s pookie. Do not call me pookie. Stop addressing people as pookie,” she stated in the video before explaining to her students why she had decided to try to remove these words from their vocabulary.
When she confirmed that words such as “bro” and “aura” would now be banned in her classroom as well, some of her students could be heard groaning and shouting in protest.
When The Sun reached out to Santalo to hear more about her Gen Z slang ban in the classroom, the science teacher revealed that it was due to “the constant repetition I heard from my students in class.”
“The reason I’m doing this is because I want you to speak like you’re more educated.”
She continued, “We’d be lining up for lunch, and I’d hear students saying, you’re so skibidi, or that’s so sigma”…I don’t get how those terms fit into a regular conversation.”
Since implementing this new rule, Santalo admitted that her students have “slipped up and used” some of the banned slang but that they do “catch themselves very quickly.”
So far, Santalo believes the ban has been effective in helping her students “learn restraint and how to speak more properly.”