Flustered by Fidget Spinners

We have four boys all age 5 or younger. So our house is basically a box with four boys ricocheting off the walls like bouncy balls.

Whether it's literally running through the house or the less blatant but far more common annoyances of rocking their chairs at the dining table or fidgeting with whatever is within reach, they're like electrons swirling about the nucleus of our house. They NEVER stop moving.

If you you're a fan of fads, the current “cure” for this sort of pent-up energy is a fidget spinner. Fidget spinners are those palm-sized metal or plastic throwing star looking objects with rounded edges and bearings in the middle that allow them to spin.

If you’re still not sure what it is, just look at the nearest seven to 12-year-old and it’s that object in their hand. No, not the cell phone, the other object.

I guess fiddling with a fidget spinner is supposed to help fidgeteers be less fidgety. I guess. I don't really follow the logic here, at least for boys. "I want you to pay attention. Here's something to distract you."

I would have loved it if I could have fidgeted with a yo-yo while I was in school. But it wouldn’t have helped me pay better attention.

I once had a teacher who said he had never taught a boy who could could successfully focus on the lesson while also doing anything with his hands except take notes. Interestingly, he said girls appeared to be able to do this (pay attention while drawing, knitting, or braiding, etc) just fine.

I don't have any girls to compare them to, but my boys' hands are a great indication of their current mental focus. If they're playing with Legos while I'm talking, my voice might as well be that of a Charlie Brown parent.

Instead of training and teaching kids how to focus, we enable or encourage distraction by giving them a toy. Seems kind of like giving a driver who has trouble focusing on the road a cell phone to make them a more alert driver.

It's funny to me that distracted driving is such a focus right now, but distracted learning (or rather a lack of focused learning) is being overlooked. Many of the teaching courses I took a few years ago were rife with techniques designed to engage students and keep them stimulated. None of them were designed to teach students to focus.

And lecture based lessons were considered outdated and thrown on the heap of old school pedagogical failures. Good thing kids never have to pay attention for long periods of time in college, medical school, or in the work force.

I think a good part of this lack of focus (or lack of appreciation of the importance of it) can be blamed on the Internet. For the last 20 years most kids have grown up with and accustomed to the overloading stimuli the Internet delivers so well.

After the constant bombardment of the Internet, anything less engaging (say a lecture on the American Revolution) is going to bore kids. But is addressing that issue by making learning more like the Internet, or introducing the distraction of a fidget spinner the best answer?

I guess the former might be when you’re teaching to a test. But I’m not sure either are the best way to prepare kids for the future. Especially since fidget spinners are pretty unlikely to be around in even a year's time.

Maybe I’m missing something and depriving my kids of the most powerful study aid in modern history. But I don’t think so. And I won’t be buying (or buying into) fidget spinners anytime soon.