In 2014, Scott McCoskery created a spinning device to cope with his fidgeting. He called his invention a Torqbar and sold it online. People began making their own versions, so in 2016 McCoskery filed for a provisional patent.

Today, we call these devices fidget spinners, and they’re the latest sensation sweeping the nation. People everywhere are using the spinners for both stress/fidget relief and entertainment.

However, many argue that fidget spinners are getting out of control. Schools are banning them from classrooms due to the problems they pose. They can be distracting, and students can injure themselves and each other fighting over them.

Freshman Greysen Simmons believes that the fidget spinners “are good for certain people with ADD/autism, but people abuse them and use fidget cubes to annoy people.” She has a fidget cube herself, but “stopped bringing it to school because people kept taking it-not teachers.”

Simmons thinks the problem isn’t with the spinners/cubes, but with the people who abuse them, and schools should only ban them “if there’s no one who needs [a spinner], but if there is they should let them have it.”

She also feels that “teachers don’t like when people are doing something other than taking notes” and teachers can’t often tell the difference between when the spinners are being a distraction and when they’re not.

Junior Max Proctor also has a fidget spinner to help calm him down. He feels “they can be [a distraction] if you let them” and people who “take them out in class and make them a distraction for others” are at fault.

Proctor believes the spinners are so popular because people find them entertaining. He also believes banning them in schools “wouldn’t be the right thing to do. If [a student] has anxiety they should be able to use them to a certain extent”.

Communications and Foundations of Technology teacher Roger Rich thinks fidget spinners are cool and he wishes he invented them, but “they can get annoying when students have them out and class and they don’t even realize they’re doing it”.

Fortunately, they haven’t been a problem in his class personally, but he would confiscate one if needed. Rich suggested students bring stress balls to squeeze instead.

Overall, fidget spinners seem like a helpful product that, as with many things, have been misused and therefore been banned.

An acceptable compromise would be removing spinners from classrooms on a case by case basis and specifying conditions on how and when they can be used by individual teachers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidget_spinner