This one is different from everything else in the archive. Dr. E wasn't booked to present. TikTok invited him, as one of a select group of creators from across the United States, to the TikTok Creator Summit 2026 in Hollywood. It was his first TikTok event, and the first time an invitation like this had come to him at all.
The email that looked too good to be true
He has been to a couple of YouTube events over the years, but nothing like this. When the invitation landed in his inbox, his first thought was that it was a scam: an unexpected email, a big brand, an exclusive event. So before replying, he checked. He even asked Claude to help him work out whether the invitation was legitimate.
It was. Doubt first, verify second — the same habit he would want any of his students to have.
How a math teacher ends up on TikTok's list
The road to that room started in 2012, in an algebra classroom at Barstow High School. Dr. E began recording lessons for a flipped-classroom experiment and uploaded them to YouTube as unlisted videos, so only his own students would find them. For the longest time, that is all they were: homework for one class.
Eventually he found the nerve to switch every video from unlisted to public. For the first three years the views stayed modest, and he was glad of it — the videos were made for his flipped classroom, not for an audience. Then the channel took off. Before the pandemic it passed 100,000 subscribers and earned YouTube's Silver Play Button.
When the pandemic moved school online, it grew again, largely because every lesson came in two versions: one in English and one in Filipino. Para sa maraming estudyante, mas madaling intindihin ang math sa sariling wika. As the channel grew, TikTok arrived, and he treated it the way he had treated YouTube — as one more place to teach. That steady, classroom-first work is what led to the invitation.
Social media can be a great place for educators, done right. As educators, we are experts in our own discipline, and we now have the venue to not just influence our students in our classroom but the world. Use it.
A math teacher in a room of creators
For a math teacher, it was an unusual room to be in, and that was the point. An invitation from TikTok says that teaching belongs on the platform as much as anything else creators make. The people he met that day, a few of them in the photo above, were the best part of it.
What the invitation says to educators
- Your classroom videos already count. The channel that earned the invitation started as homework for one class of algebra students.
- A quiet start is fine. Three years of modest views gave the lessons time to get better before anyone was watching.
- Two languages open more doors. The Filipino versions are a big reason the channel grew when school went online.
Double-booked, and it didn't matter
The summit overlapped with a faculty best-practices presentation already on his calendar at Barstow Community College, where he teaches math. Not long ago, that would have meant choosing one. Instead, the college let him present remotely, and he delivered Teach It Like You Stream It to the faculty and administrators of his own college for the first time, online, from Los Angeles.
It was a fitting demonstration of the framework itself: a live session, delivered well over a screen, by someone who wasn't in the building. In this day and age, double-booking is not really a problem.
What this invitation opened up
An invitation is a different kind of recognition from a conference acceptance. There was no proposal and no review committee; the platform noticed the work. For Dr. E, it confirmed what he tells educators in every Teach It Like You Stream It session: the skills creators use belong in teaching, and teachers who use them can reach far beyond their own classroom.
The fall kept moving. Two weeks later he presented Teach It Like You Stream It at EDUCAUSE 2026, and a week after that came word that the session had been accepted to SXSW EDU 2027.