Accounting classes have never been this fun! Professor Ryan Ball, 47, has been teaching at The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business for more than nine years. This summer, he was teaching a master’s level class and decided to spice things up: He used the potato filter while teaching on Zoom, and his students loved it…
One student in the class, Amelia Charamand-Quelas, 20, was so excited that she shared a TikTok video on Tuesday that went viral.
What started as an April Fool’s prank on an undergraduate class last year, quickly turned into a staple of Ball’s lectures. Ball said students loved it, but they weren’t the only ones cracking up.
When Charamand-Quelas first hopped on the Zoom for her “Accounting 557: Evaluating Financial Performance” class she wasn’t expecting anything crazy. She saw her professor dressed as a potato and knew it needed to be filmed.
She said when she went to bed two hours after posting the video, it had one like. But when she woke up, it was a viral video with more than 100,000 likes. The video at the time of publishing this has 3.7 million likes and 15.5 million views on TikTok. The comments on the follow-up TikTok (39,000+) echo the enthusiasm from the original.
Ball said his fellow teachers and faculty at the university have also had generally positive reactions. Some colleagues even replaced his nametag outside his office to read “Po Tato” instead of “Ryan Ball.”
