Famous Fornite streamers plus a Liberty math teacher equals an unlikely combination.
Many students know and love Mr. Kennedy’s famous math live-streams. In a typical stream, Kennedy goes over the math lesson to help students prepare for an upcoming exam. But on November 4, student viewers got quite the unusual surprise when Fortnite streamers raided the math lesson.
While Kennedy answered Calculus questions for a test review, verified youtube accounts filled the chat bar with messages including, “math first, Fortnite later,” “Fortnite time,” and, “PLEASE play fortnite with me you will be in a video.” Fortunately, the accounts refrained from swearing or acting inappropriately. Still, the raid was still an interruption.
“It is annoying when my stream becomes too full of trolling. I am trying to see questions from students so I can answer them and parsing through the garbage is a bit annoying,” Kennedy said. Students were shocked to see the messages but tried to stay focused on the math content.
“When I saw a couple people typing dumb messages unrelated to math, I couldn’t focus on what Kennedy was teaching and the youtubers kept trying to interact with us students. Later I went to their channels and was surprised to see they had millions of subscribers,” said sophomore viewer Ethan Doan.
Despite receiving countless requests to join the streamers for a game of Fortnite, Kennedy was not impressed.
“My streams are entirely educational so I don’t honor the people spamming with other requests regardless of who they may or may not be. Ultimately I don’t care about Fortnite streamers, so in no way, shape or form was I star struck,” he said.
Still, Kennedy could not help but wonder where those famous Fortnite streamers had come from. He discovered they were friends of his former student and Liberty alumni Liam Roming. Roming had been following Kennedy’s account, LibertyMathandStuff, since his freshman year and now has a job creating thumbnail art for Youtube content creators. He used his connections to send the popular streamers on the raid.
In the end, Kennedy reflected that it was a “harmless gag,” and certainly entertained his students.
“I’ll admit it. It was pretty hilarious,” Ethan Doan added.