A follow-up to the fidget spinner post:

I happen to be a fan of music while working. Being ADHD myself, I have always worked to background noise. I do much better with the clattering of dishes falling to the floor behind me than I do in a quiet library. That’s me, and I am not alone. I used to do needlepoint during college lectures. I naturally feel sympathetic to students who benefit from fidget toys.

But my last post about fidget spinners addressed an ongoing attack on our children’s focus and learning. We have middle school and high school children playing with tiny plastic dots that cling to each other, Wikki Stix^TM, Chewelry^TM and alternative plastic chew toys, classic Silly Putty^TM, magnetic balls or disks. stress balls, various squishy toys, play foam, kinetic sand, rubbery squeeze toys such as Koosh^TM Balls, Velcro strips, and many other fidget toys, not all of them silent in character. No wonder flipping and thumping bottles on tables recently became a hot classroom fashion.

Eduhonesty: We are allowing too many toys. We ought to stick mostly to squeeze balls in regular classrooms. In special education classrooms, we may want to allow the full panoply of fidget toys, but the average language arts or social studies classroom is not benefitting when its students look like a focus group studying kids’ toys. I acknowledge exceptions must be made. Some students with IEPs need to chew special plastics to manage stress, for example.

But these toys are distracting, even when used according to the IEP. Eyes gravitate to fidget spinners, play foam and Koosh balls^TM. The sound of Velcro can reverberate throughout a room. Worse, toys end up being used by many students without IEPs. Sometimes Javier shares. Sometimes Jasmine brings her own Silly Putty^TM,

We are fighting fire with fire out here, using distractions to manage distractibility. Fidget toys can work. Setting fires to create a manmade firebreak protects people from wildfires. But deliberate fires don’t always go as planned. In the year 2000, the wind shifted, and the National Park Service managed to burn down 200 homes near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The big fidget toy question of today: In the wrong place at the wrong time, is it possible we are burning down some classrooms in order to save them?