Fidgeting for a Spinner

“Is your son going to spend his summer with a collection of fidget spinners,” I asked the mom sitting next to me at a meeting last week.

Bruce Wallace

The mom, who has three kids and a husband in her amazing Ashland family enjoys her anonymity and utilizes the pseudonym Tracy Bond in this column (see if you can figure out her clever gag), scoffed at the notion.

“James – another fictional name for the sake of this writing – doesn’t have a fidget spinner, isn’t getting any fidgeting spinners and will forever fidget without a spinner.”

Tracy Bond’s declarative statement, along with her ability to utilize the term “fidget” as a noun, verb and adjective in a single sentence impressed me. Sort of the way a Marine sergeant can utilize certain words not fit for a family newspaper in various forms of the English language.

And make no mistake about it, while I’m sure she is a loving mother, when it comes to fidget spinners Tracy Bond is more Marine sergeant than mother of three children.

“What is it about fidget spinners that has moms so angry?” I asked with a laugh. “It’s a silly diversion!”

For the uneducated, a fidget spinner is the latest fad toy – popular especially in elementary schools across the country. A fidget spinner has two or three paddle-shaped blades attached to a central core. Squeeze the core, give the blades a flick and they spin. That’s it. With a price between US $3 and $4 and available in all sorts of color schemes, many children can carry around a pocketful.

However, some of the fancier fidget spinners can cost as much as $15.

“It is an $11 toy that he will be tired of before the end of the summer,” Tracy Bond fumed, just warming up to the litany of reasons why James would not be seeing a fidget anytime soon.

Fidget spinners have attracted all kinds of commentary from child psychologists to school counselors. Some schools banned them as a distraction this past spring and but other educators have said they calm special needs students.

“Your wife’s a teacher,” Tracy Bond noted, “go ask her why those silly things drive us crazy.”

I tend to think toy fads are an innocent passing fancy, but Bond is right, I could use a quote from a teacher. My wife is a teacher. But I see no need to start a marital knock-down-drag-out bloody fight just for the sake of a newspaper column.

Back in the early 1970s – yes, waaaay back then – the top fad in the fifth grade were clackers. Remember clackers? That was the toy which had two 2-inch plastic spheres connected by a string, which, when swung up and down, smacked each other and made a large clacking sound.

This toy was simply annoying to most of the boys at Herbert Hoover Elementary School, until one of us – I blame Mike Fraser – learned we could smack each other with the clacker balls. Or, if out of sight of a teacher during recess, could sling them at each other. The injuries were typically a lump on the noggin or a bruise here and there, but nobody went to the hospital.

None of us could understand why clackers quit being a fad as they were pulled off the shelves at TG&Ys everywhere. Apparently a few kids went to the hospital somewhere.

But fidget spinners?

My mom used to tell my older sister and I that, “I had better not see you fidget,” when we were in church or anywhere else we were expected to sit still. We eventually learned to sit still because my parents expected us to sit still on given occasions and held us accountable. Fidgeting met with swift consequences.

But apparently, by today’s standards, fidgeting is a welcome pastime. Or maybe not.

One reporter in Chicago claims that if China invades our West coast, our children – and most Californians – would be too busy with fidget spinners to defend themselves.

Oh, please.

Kids are begging their parents for new spinners each time they see their friends with one. Sort of like….their parents each time a new phone upgrade hits the shelves.

Does the fidget spinner belong in the classroom? No more so than it does at the dinner table. Absolutely not. That would be like a cell phone ringing in the middle of a business meeting – which never happens, right?

I say buy the kid a fidget spinner – it’s cheap entertainment that has kids playing together. What is difficult for teachers, and parents, is that the fidget spinner is one more headache to control – or, teaching kids/students to have discipline.

I hope James Bond gets his fidget spinner, but I’m betting Tracy Bond has the final word.