It’s fidget spinner rush hour at S.W. Randall Toyes and Giftes in Squirrel Hill, as school children stream through the front door marked with a sign reading “We Have Fidget Spinners and Cubes!”
As the clock struck 3 p.m. one day last week, 9-year-old Gianna Watling of Highland Park snagged the store’s last rainbow-colored model, a replacement for her first fidget spinner, which wasn’t working right after it fell while she was spinning it in the bath. Yoanna Ivanova, a kindergartner at St. Edmund’s Academy, came in next to pick out a pink one (really the only choice because they didn’t have purple, she said). And Zach Karabin, still wearing the paper birthday hat he received at PPS Colfax K-8 that day for turning 6, chose a green one for a “pre-party” birthday present.
“We’ve sold out at least 12 times,” said store manager Dinell Holmes. The store has stocked them for about 1½ months and was selling them that day for $7.99. Gianna and her mother had struck out at Five Below and Bed Bath & Beyond before they bought her spinner at S.W. Randall.
Fidget spinners — which are sometimes marketed to improve concentration — currently occupy all of the top 14 spots on Amazon’s best-selling toy list. No. 15 is a “fidget cube.”
“It seemed like they were not here one day, and then everywhere you looked the next day,” Anthony J. Mooney, principal of Quaker Valley Middle School, wrote in an email.
As they’ve descended upon America, the gadgets have caused quite a stir. The Atlantic asserts they are “the perfect material metaphor for everyday life in early 2017, for good and for ill.” The New Yorker considered whether the toy “encourages the abdication of thought, and promotes a proliferation of mindlessness, and it does so at a historical moment when the president has proved himself to be pathologically prone to distraction and incapable of formulating a coherent idea.”
One mother at S.W. Randall pondered more practical concerns. “Maybe it could help my husband stop smoking,” she mused.
But no one has thought more about fidget spinners than teachers and school administrators, seeking to control the now-ubiquitious gadgets in the classroom. One Facebook meme shared by teachers answered the question of how to use a fidget spinner with “throw it in the trash.”
Fidget spinners are banned in 32 percent of 200 of the largest high schools in the country, according to SpinnerList, a website for “spinner fanatics.”
At Quaker Valley, Mr. Mooney said that fidget spinners are allowed in class, “but like anything else, if it becomes a distraction to anyone — including the teacher, the individual student who owns the spinner, or to any other student — then the spinner can and will be confiscated. “
In the Mt. Lebanon School District, “no teacher or principal has banned them from their classroom/school,” emailed spokeswoman Cissy Bowman. “But as with anything, our teachers use good classroom management practices to ensure that nothing interferes with the teaching and learning going on in their class.”
In the Pittsburgh Public Schools, “while some schools have reported negligible issues, some have seen success with students in terms of calming anxiety and staying focused,” emailed spokeswoman Ebony Pugh.
When the fidget spinners showed up at Harrison Middle School in the Baldwin-Whitehall School District, there were “lots of conversations amongst teachers,” said special education teacher Elisabeth Crittenden. “Most decided it was not appropriate in the classroom. It was very distracting.”
That said, Ms. Crittenden does find that the spinners can be helpful for her special education students, such as those with autism or ADHD. Some of those students have been longtime users of “fidgets” as simple as a rubber band to keep their hands or feet busy.
“It keeps the focus off their internal stimulation,” she said, noting that research studies have shown fidgeting helps students with ADHD stay focused. One 2014 study in the journal Child Neuropsychology found that the benefits of activity did not transfer to students without ADHD, however.
Because the items have small parts, they’re not for children under age 3.
Back at S.W. Randall, third-grader Leo Youssef is doing tricks with a fidget spinner he’d gotten the day before. “I was literally the only person in the class that didn’t have one,” he said.
While the 9-year-old from Highland Park thinks the spinner helps him concentrate (his mother, standing nearby, begged to differ), he does admit that hearing the whirring of so many spinners at once was distracting in class.
The day he finally got one and brought it to school, his teacher at the Campus School of Carlow University decided that they shouldn’t be used during instructional time — although still permitted at snack, lunch and recess.
At the Learning Express toy store in Bakery Square, employees are betting that the craze will continue through the summer. The store has scheduled three “Spinner Showdowns” on Saturdays in June, where enthusiasts can compete to see which spinner spins the longest.
The first one, held in May, drew more than 25 people packed inside the store. “We kept saying ‘go, go, go,’ ” said event coordinator Corey Walton. “It was an uproar with crowds cheering.”
The store, which charges between $15.99 and $19.99 per spinner (with high-quality ceramic bearings) and has been selling more than 100 per weekend day, offers dozens of varieties, from iridescent metal, to light-up and glow-in-the-dark, to Steelers and Penguins themes.
“Honestly, I’m surprised that it’s still going,” said Ms. Walton.
Anya Sostek: asostek@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1308.
First Published: May 24, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
