Sarah Ashley Winans woke up in the middle of the night with test anxiety. Only, she wasn’t the one set to take the state exam. She’s the middle school teacher who would be administering it.
Winans, a teacher in Eastman, Georgia, went viral for a video she shared April 23 of herself realizing she forgot to plug in her computer cart the day before her sixth grade class was set to take a state exam.
“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 tells TODAY.com.
Because her classroom doesn’t have many outlets, she recalls unplugging the computer cart for a pencil sharpener, to make sure she had plenty of No. 2 pencils ahead of the state tests. But she never plugged the cart back in.
So at around 10:15 p.m. on April 21, Winans hopped out of bed, put her shoes on, grabbed her car keys and texted her school’s administrator. She picked up the keys to the building and within minutes, she was walking through the hallways of her middle school — still in her pajamas and hair bonnet.Winans says she lives just 5 minutes from the school, so she “didn’t even think to put on clothes.”
When she arrived to the school, she walked into her classroom, plugged in the cart (yes, it was actually unplugged) and went back home, unable to fall back asleep.
She jokes when she told her fellow teachers, “nobody was shocked.”
“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 says with a laugh. “So I can forget kind of easily sometimes.”
Later, she thought of all the security cameras around her school and asked her administrator if she could see the footage.
“She let me look at it, and then I said, ‘I have to record it,’” Winans recalls.
The footage, which Winans shared to TikTok in a now viral video, shows the teacher in her pajamas, slides and bonnet getting out of her car right outside the entrance and walking through the hallways before arriving at her classroom. On her way out, she flashes a peace sign at the camera.
“POV: You forgot to plug in your Chromebook cart and state testing starts tomorrow,” she wrote over the video, which has more than 13 million views and 2 million likes as of April 28.
She set the footage to the Hannah Montana track, “This Is the Life” — fittingly the first song TikTok suggested to accompany the video, she says — and soon, had a viral video on her hands.
Winans says she’s been taking screenshots of her favorite comments on the post, including:
“I just know you were stress texting your principal.”
“The way you definitely had to ask someone else for this footage too 😂 I’m dying lol”
“Girl you so lucky the school ghost didn’t get you 😂 … I refuse to go into my classroom after dark!”
“Yall know she was (on the phone) with someone bc she was scared to death.” (“And I was, I was on the phone with one of my friends. I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to talk to somebody before I come in here,’” Winans says.)
In the caption of the video, Winans added, “Test taking anxiety isn’t just for the kids. Mind you…this was at 10:15 p.m.”
Winans says pre-test nerves “definitely” caused her to wake up in the middle of the night. Part of being a teacher is being nervous for her students, “because I don’t want them to be nervous,” she says.
“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 says. “I know testing can really put a lot of pressure on people.”
Winans says she’s shocked by the attention the video has received.
“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 says. “And I just was doing my job.”
