Fidget Spinners

Our school and in fact most in our borough have banned these. The ban in our school has been in place for nearly 3 weeks. The SENCO will be reviewing it after half term, by which time she hopes this fad will have started to die down.

Over half of the teaching staff complained to the head just before and after the Easter hols as the pupils were just messing around with them in class, not one of whom has any notifiable condition other than some choice staffroom descriptors. There have been squabbles over them, which cause disruption to classes. None of those with the usual conditions, that one might suppose need them, have one. We have 3 kids who don’t go into classes and another 10 across year 7 to 11, most of these have class support. If pupils are struggling to concentrate or deal with their emotions and being disruptive they are removed to ‘the unit’ and parents informed as their behaviour is not conducive to everyone else’s learning. Teacher’s have enough to deal with in and out of classrooms, without fashionable fads like this causing disruption.

Like all confiscated items parents are informed and asked to pick them up in person and unlike mobiles, not one parent has been in to collect them or complain. I imagine they feel the same about them as teachers do. Some that have been confiscated are solid metal and could do some serious damage if thrown and hitting someone.
Several of those confiscated have flashing lights in them, which the SENCO finds bizarre as many of those with attention deficit and other conditions are likely to be prone to fitting which flashing lights can be a trigger for, hence the warnings over strobe / multiple flashing lights in theatres, TV and so on.

We’ve not seen them at the sqn.

but just occasionally I do actually wonder at your suitability to be involved in a youth organisation.[/quote]
Matt you should spend some time working with those who work with young people outside the Corps. Having been a member of a community panel for young offenders for 3 years and have worked in schools, you would conclude that many youth workers and teachers shouldn’t be involved with children. I thought they would be simpering lefty liberals, but no, far from it, the way the youth offender people talk to the kids would get you quite worked up. They do not mess around with words. The things that get said behind closed doors, about parents as well, make our friend Teflon’s comments positively mild by comparison. Don’t get me wrong the people I have met and work with, work bloody hard to try and make things better for the kids they work with or teach, but that doesn’t mean them being all saccharin about them. Maybe Teflon says things as he sees them, which it would appear to not be inline with current ATC policy, but many actually working with children aren’t “on the ATC message”.
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There’s a key difference for starters…

Behind closed doors is not an entirely restricted audience and when you consider the number of people who they are around when it’s said.

And now they are banned in some schools in the U.S after a girl choked on a part.

I don’t think she was supposed to eat it.

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This is the country that banned Kinder Eggs for the same reason…

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We banned a lot of things for “health and safety”, or Mickey Mouse religious reasons, what’s your point?

They are kids, they aren’t supposed to do a lot of things, they still do them though.

The clues in the name. Fidget. What you think kids are going to do. They are going to fidget with them. And who says she tried to eat it? There’s all kinds of “tricks” you can do with them, including balancing them on your nose.
Poorly constructed, and encouraged it could have come apart when she tried to do that.

Honestly. You snowflakes jump to all kinds of conclusions when it’s something you disagree with but then you suddenly try and brush things off when it suits you.

They are a load of nonsense.

Have we?

These seem to have died a death on the sqn at least.

I am always against banning things for silly reasons. If you use something properly and it hurts you, then you should question whether or not it should be used. If you use something improperly and it hurts you, what is the point in banning it? Yes you could coke on a spinner, but you could also choke on a USB SD card reader or a yoyo. Neither of these are supposed to be eaten or balanced on your nose. If someone happened to swallow one and choke, why should they be banned? The child in question obviously wasn’t taught the dangers of having small objects around the mouth area. Then there are those stories from Russia of those children dieing while trying to take ‘ultimate’ selfies, as normal ones obviously aren’t good enough. I know the dangers of freight trains and high voltage cables, so I do not stand in front of or grab them respectively. If someone dies from doing so, are you going to make trains, high voltage cables or selfies illegal?

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You missed my point.
Everyone was gobbing off about how wonderful they are, how good they are and how they can help with “attention disorders” (despite a huge lack of medical proof).

Instead of playing up to fads we need to be nipping it in the bud or just realising it’s a big load of BS, and actually trying to educate kids.

Other than that, yea I agree with blanket banning. It’s BS, and just because one idiot does something doesn’t mean we should ban it for others (Like a firearms ban, a few idiots spoil it for everyone else :wink: )
But you can’t just blame it on the kids. Instead of playing up to the fads, the school shouldn’t allow them because they are distractions. If the school had the balls to ban them before then it could have be avoided.

One of the H&S nonsenses I see all too often is fences around building / construction sites. These were our playgrounds along with some industrial sites and so on, when I was growing up. Now there are cameras and signs warning of impending death. We didn’t vandalise anything or break anything, had a game of cowboys and Indians or war and went home for dinner or tea.

You do understand that your own experience doesn’t actually provide all the evidence necessary to make an informed decision?

Just because you didn’t die on a building site, doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. Are you one of these people who have one relative who miraculously lived to 85 despite smoking, drinking and not exercisimg and so tell everyone that all health advice is rubbish too?

Disagree. The concept of HS is not half bad. But it’s the legal system, the jobs worth doorknobs, the spineless solicitors, and ignorant people that are the problem.

Example: Building site, big fence, lots of signage, and a nightguard. Someone breaks in and dies. Suddenly the construction site is in the wrong for not doing more.

It’s become a massive echo chamber of people not taking responsibility for their own stupid actions.

It’s a huge money making industry based on…common sense. What actually happens to the fines? Lines the pockets of the desktop jockeys. Why not have a fixed fine that the company has to spend on the area it failed on?

The services get wrapped up in red tape and nonsense when trying to do a job. The chain of command hammers down impractical and over bloated HSE rubbish, but on the ground it’s the lads that improvise or tweak it, and if they get caught out, then it’s them in the dock. Not the person who’s so out of touch with the frontline they make up impractical HSE constraints.

You would be surprised the amount of people in the public services that have bent the rules, but the outcome was positive, and they still got hammered and threatened with disciplinary action and if it wasn’t for media attention or similar, it would happen.

Mainly because half the officers and heirarchy are so scared and spineless it’s their neck on the line, and they have no top cover or any amount of back up for their decisions.

And when the state gets onboard it becomes a machine to control your physical actions, while political correctness is a self censoring, control of your mind. It’s already Borderline thought Police and pre-crime.

[quote=“RearAdmiralScrinson, post:64, topic:2949”]
Example: Building site, big fence, lots of signage, and a nightguard. Someone breaks in and dies. Suddenly the construction site is in the wrong for not doing more.
[/quote]Depends whether they were in any way reckless or negligent, and even then it would only be their responsibility if it was a child that was injured.

But why is it their responsibility in account of the child being an idiot.

We all make choices in life. The consequences vary on which choice you make.

This isn’t just my experience. I would imagine that many of my age and older and some younger will have played in places and done things that would make many who today see danger behind every blade of grass, recoil. Our son and his mates did things that a couple of his mates parents went ballistic over, whereas we were a bit more measured.

The problem is that being so risk averse means that generations grow up not experiencing or understanding the need to take personal levels of care.

An interesting experience is driving sans seat belt, I have (on private land) and see what my dad means when he says you don’t drive anything like you do with a seat belt and all the other gizmos in a car.

Fidget spinner - Russian style.

Because children are - by their very nature - inclined to be less than sensible.