It is not every day that an avid TikTok user gets to film their entire day working as a substitute teacher in a school. The 24-year-old creator, Miata Borders, was fired on her first day at a Mississippi school after a viral TikTok showed her making a controversial comment about students. With a robust 100K followers on the social media platform, Border garnered attention with her video, which made netizens point out that she indeed had crossed a line with the kind of words she associated with students passing by in the corridor.
Talking about the video, it started with Miata filming herself as she walked through the hallway of the school. Her ‘day in the life’ clip then had some more clips of her faux-teaching while students weren’t even inside the classroom. She captured various moments inside the school premises, including one where a bunch of students were seen moving in a parade through the school hallways. At one point, several students even mistook her for one of them and were surprised to learn that Miata was actually a teacher.
However, it was at this moment that Borders crafted controversy with her sudden choice of words in the voiceover. Addressing the mini-parade that was taking place, she said, “Damn, shorty, sheesh… Man, I gotta get up after these school kids tryna take me down.” Well, this very word ‘shorty’ grabbed attention in no time, and viewers flagged it tremendously. For the unversed, this particular phrase sometimes also refers to commenting on someone as ‘good-looking’. Viewers, including those who were parents themselves, thus found Miata’s behavior towards students concerning and crossing a line.
A substitute high school teacher was fired on their first day for making TikTok videos at school and calling female students ‘shorty.’ 👀
— My Mixtapez (@mymixtapez) October 27, 2025
With such an alarming amount of backlash coming towards Miata Borders’ video, the particular school took immediate action, and before it could circulate any more, they announced firing her from the services almost immediately. DeSoto County Schools, in their statement to WREG, said, “District officials informed Kelly Services today that the person is no longer allowed to be a substitute teacher for DeSoto County Schools.” The decision was surprising, given that it was her very first day on the job.
Meanwhile, other fellow TikTok users also commented on the 24-year-old teacher’s clip as inappropriate, commenting how she should not have been allowed to record a video within the school premises in the first place. Criticising her behavior, one of them said, “You didn’t realize you couldn’t record minors???? Like what??”. Another fellow TikTok user wrote, “What do you mean you didn’t know you couldn’t record the students? You can’t record someone else’s child, period….u can’t record anybody without their consent, that’s the law.”
The same video also circulated widely on X, where netizens judged on the very tone of Miata Borders’ clip. One of them wrote, “A lunchable and Skittles talk about a lil breakfast lmaooooooooooo.” In response to the brutal response and loss of job, the TikToker has, ever since, started off with damage control by dropping apology and clarificatory videos on social media.
In a series of videos, she explained her perspective and claimed that viewers misunderstood her intentions. In her words, “What I meant by shorty in a terminology take there were the kids were going to take me down were absolutely not what you guys took them as. Those kids were smaller than me, shorter than me, younger than me. They are shorties, they are young. Absolutely means nothing with flirting.”
She also counter-argued that she didn’t know it wasn’t allowed to film students inside the school. Miata added that she had added the voiceover to the video after returning from the campus. Expressing frustration over the negative comments she got, she concluded, “I had absolutely no idea […] I assure you that it would not have been posted. I’m by far no predator or anything close to it. I truly just thought I was doing some good for the youth.”
