By Kristine Laco of Mum Revised
The recent craze of students using fidget spinners in classrooms has caused a general uproar among teachers in a Colorado community.
“I don’t feel the children are listening to me anymore when the spinners are around,” Ms. Sidearm told this reporter from County lockup. “The kids just appear to be watching their hands and watching each others’ hands, and the general whir in the classroom is driving me mad.”
The school was excited to invite the spinners into the classrooms, believing them to be the answer for distracted children to keep them on task. YouTube videos talked about the benefits spinners have for ADHD kids, anxiety sufferers, handsy kids, and all boys. Instead, the opposite appears to be true.
We interviewed several kids in the halls of Greenhorne Middle School, where Ms. Sidearm works. They were hanging around in the halls, apparently doing tricks with the spinners and comparing notes. Not school notes; notes on how to do the tricks. They all didn’t hear the bell for the next class ring as I approached.
I asked one young man, an 8th-grade student they call Spinmaster, to show me a trick. He taught me how to do the Hand Twist, the Around the Back, and the Spinner Swap. The Spinner Swap was the maneuver that finally drove Ms. Sidearm to confiscate all classroom spinners before the incident that sent one student to the hospital.
The students were, apparently, passing the spinners back and forth between each other over the sounds of Ms. Sidearm’s reading of Hamlet.
“It was funny for a while because Ms. Sidearm had no idea we all had several spinners. So when she went back to doing something stupid at the front with our first spinners, we went back to the Swaps,” recanted Spinmaster. “We just didn’t see that Ms. Sidearm was holding one of our spinners under her desk. It happened so fast that we didn’t see her whip it like a ninja star at Dizzy.”
The kids in the group started laughing at the situation, but this is no laughing matter. Dizzy is the spinning name of a fellow student, Izzy. The spinner stuck in Izzy’s back when Ms. Sidearm, allegedly, threw it at her as she turned her back to swap spinners. Ironically, Ms. Sidearm used Izzy’s spinner as the weapon in question.
Spinmaster, once he stopped laughing, continued, “I didn’t see it coming because I was watching Dizzy. One minute we were having fun and the next minute she had a spinner lodged in her back.” He finished with, “It could have been me.”
He walked away, forgetting his backpack. He was spinning four spinners at once to combat the apparent increase in stress of his classmate’s condition and the near miss he, himself, survived.
“Not since the bottle toss has anything the children have caught on to created more annoyance,” the Principal, Mr. Huff stated. “We even had a teacher workshop on the benefit of these gadgets to learning, concentration, and overall good health of our students, and we totally bought into the story,” Mr. Huff added.
In Colorado, a statewide ban on the offending objects is being considered based on the results of the Greenhorne Middle School case. Many high schools and middle schools throughout the country have instituted the ban already, claiming the objects a distraction to learning.
Utah was the first state to ban spinners because of their apparent religious significance. No one in the Governor’s office could tell us those reasons at the time of press.
“We are hoping these spinners end up in the same closet as Wheelies, Silly Bandz, and Tamagotchis,” Principal Huff concluded.
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About the Author
Kristine Laco shares her stories at MumRevised.com with a splash of sarcasm and a pinch of bitch. She lives in the Toronto area and is a stay-at-home mother of two kids aged 14 and 12 and a fur-baby. Her middle finger is her favorite. You can find more from her on Facebook and Twitter.