The Ministry of Silly Bans
From our fast-growing “Oh, for #@*’s sake!” file: schools around the nation are banning Silly Bandz, those amusing, inexpensive, rubber wristbands that have become immensely popular among the nation’s children.
This is conclusive proof, if any were yet needed, that the people who run America’s schools hate kids and are utterly power-mad. Time magazine reports:
The Bandz are now contraband. Schools in several states, including New York, Texas, Florida and Massachusetts, have blacklisted Silly Bandz, those stretchy, colorful bracelets that are creeping up the forearms of school kids across the U.S. And starting this week, all 800-some kids at my son’s elementary school in Raleigh, N.C., were commanded to leave at home their collections of rubber band–like bracelets, which retail for about $5 per pack of 24. What could possibly be so insidious about a cheap silicone bracelet?
“It’s a distraction,” says Jill Wolborsky, a fourth-grade teacher at my son’s school, who banned them from her classroom before the principal implemented a schoolwide ban. One student stole some confiscated Bandz from her desk, choosing them over the cash in her drawer.
Students fiddle with them during class and arrange swaps — trading, say, a bracelet with a mermaid for one with a dragon — when they should be concentrating on schoolwork, teachers say. Sometimes a trade goes bad — kids get buyer’s remorse too — and hard feelings, maybe even scuffles, ensue.
Astonishing! Kids distracted during school? Fiddling with things? Feelings getting hurt? Scuffles ensuing?
Obviously the nation’s educators would be much more comfortable teaching robots, or potted plants.
Of course, these egotistical nitwits have some scientists on their side. Some are now arguing, apparently in all seriousness, that Silly Bandz are outright dangerous:
Last night Dr. Manny’s young daughter had more than a hundred of these Silly Bandz wound tightly around her wrist. Her hand was white, and he was concerned enough to make her take them off. …
Dr. Gregory Simonian, chief of endovascular surgery and director of the Heart Vascular Hospital at Hackensack University Medical Center, told me that his daughter also wears Silly Bandz, and that Dr. Manny could be on to something.
“Whether it’s tight bracelets or a ring on your finger, anything that is constricting could cause vascular insufficiency — meaning the blood flow is being altered by some external force. In this case, it’s the new, hip rubber bracelets,” Simonian said. …
“These bands could cause what we call a tourniquet effect that can cause your veins to get congested. The bracelets could cause blood clots to form in some of the veins, giving someone a phlebitis, which is an inflammation and clotting of the vein,” he said.
Although there may be some remote chance of such things occurring, there are always minor possibilities of all sorts of disasters happening, and nothing can change that simple fact of life. The doctors’ arguments are reminiscent of the classic Saturday Night Live sketch “Consumer Probe,” starring Dan Aykroyd as the manufacturer of a line of blatantly dangerous children’s toys who defends himself by noting that even the most apparently innocuous playthings can be deadly: children could get a splinter from a toy block or strangle themselves to death with the cord of a toy telephone, etc. The real-life bans of Silly Bandz are every bit as ridiculous as this.
Hmmm …. Weren’t there some Congressional or Senatorial types passing these things out recently? Ones that were made in the state colors of Arizona or some such? I can understand the medical warnings. Apparently those Washingtonians were wearing them around their necks and cut off all blood supply to the brain, giving them hallucinations about racists and such.
Under all the BS rhetoric, liberals are risk-averse control freaks, authoritarian types who always think they know better. I went to school in America when I was a kid, this was in the 1960′s & the trend was already starting. They wanted robots not children. It seemed as if the object was to make you hate to learn, there was no joy in learning, no discovery. Most of my teachers were hacks, unimaginative, dull, boring, incompetent, hacks. All I got out of school was a hatred for authority, anything I learned, I learned on my own. Today, as I see it, political correctness has taken over completely. Luckily for me, I had a very multi-cultural (I hate using this term) background & my parents encouraged me to learn on my own.
They do these kinds of bans because they are helpless against the kinds of things that really harm our kids, like heroin, meth, alcohol, DUI’s, gang violence, teen age and below pregnancies, sex predators and STD’s to name a few. Why else would politicians and school administrators worry about Twinkie consumption and ignore the spectacle of high school girls dying from black tar heroin use?
Real teachers would take the opportunity to use the bands for better teaching. A math teacher can use silly bands to give good examples and exercises for children, who would be happy to learn maths with their favourite toy. Of course, this is not happening. Very bad, America, and sad too.
A good math, economics or social studies teacher could use the bands to teach numerous subjects from how the market sets prices to how fads start. Pity there are fewer good teachers these days. As much as I hated Mrs Gooch – yes, real name – she made me learn when I was in the 6th grade.
Well ya got trouble, my friend!
Mothers of River City,
heed this warning before it’s too late
Watch for the tell-tale signs of corruption
The minute your son leaves the house
does he rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knee?
Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?
A dime novel hidden in the corncrib?
Is he starting to memorize jokes
from Cap’n Billy’s Whizbang?
Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like… swell?
And… ‘so’s your old man’?
Well if so, my friends…
Ya got trouble!
Just another brick in the ………
So, the average parent in America is finally waking up to the reality of public school? Its a 12 year protracted exercise in obedience to authority and if you happen to get educated along the way, consider that a fortunate side-effect.
I figured this out over 30 years ago as a student in Delaware’s public schools. I don’t even consider my schools to have been particularly egregious in this regard and yet it was still blatantly obvious to anyone who was paying attention.
You got it in one and with no further comment necessary. Let’s leave kids alone, a fad is just a fad, and if my kid’s hand begins to show stress I will make them do something about it. Don’t need a nanny to look out after them. Ya, and maybe the fun will go out of school. Almost there now.
Never let a crisis go to waste. And if there is none, manufacture one. In the case of deference to authority, practice makes perfect.
Yeah, it’s amazing we got educated and didn’t get ‘distracted’ into lives of crime given our horrible black markets in marbles and baseball cards.
Wow…I thought boys with “crotch hand” were bad, and actually it is, but schools do little.
…now this, dear God in heaven where will this terrible thing lead us??
Let the world hear our cry!! “Vive le Silly Bandz!”
OMG! Beware fellow parents! The next step is obvious; HEROIN!!!
Silly Bandz — I thought you meant those bracelets Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden were wearing to express their disapproval of Arizona’s new law. Yeah, I’m in favor of banning those.
Or better yet, Tax them! After all Nancy could get a blood clot!
On third thought though, I’d really like to Ban Nancy, and Joe, And Reid, and the rest of the Dems including You-Know-Who — And add some Republicans to that as well!
Whenever I see them I my blood pressure goes up! I could get a stroke! BAN THEM!!! Where’s MY Nanny???
Some very wise and insightful comments on just why teachers always seem to want to ban anything kids enjoy.
Advice to the manufacturers of Silly Bandz:
Make some with Obama, Michelle, the Obama Logo, and/or Islam mentioned on them, and it will be OKAY again.
In fact, they may even become mandatory, or kids who wear them will get extra credit.
Just don’t make any with American flags, Gadsden flags, or anything remotely Christian on them.
Watch out – next thing you know those Silly Bandz will have quotations on them from ObaMAO – you know – like the little red book of quotations from Chairman Mao. When that happens wearing them will suddenly become mandatory as it was in China in the 60s & 70s.
It could happen.
I’m a teacher of High School Geography and History in Canada. If I do not have the ability to
be more interesting than a rubber band to my students, then maybe I should be fired. A distraction
indeed. C’mon teachers pick up the pace and make your classes interesting. Lazy jerks.
I’m not sure why we have a Department of Education but I would like to nominate you as the Secretary! Any chance we could get you to emigrate to the US? We obviously can’t help ourselves.
After viewing the SNL program with Irwin Mainway, I wanted a “bag o’ glass” for all of the kids on my Christmas list. Oh. those were the days.
Really. If that SNL skit aired today, there’d be all manner of nannies bursting into flames.
Followed by a plethora of ambulance chasing lawyers.
Y’all, I am wearing a silly band as I type. It’s just a boring old flower, which is why (I assume) it was not on my 8 year old’s wrist.
The kids have a lot of fun with them (major lefty no-no) and though there were some initial problems (there has yet to be a school-wide ban, but DD’s teacher put an early kibosh on them until the children *gasp* were able to act responsibly with them) with jealousy (that’s a human emotion, for those not familiar) all in all it’s been a positive experience. Yup, it’s just a fad no better or worse than any other, and I think the only true loss will be all the dang money wasted on a pile of rubberbands I will throw out a year from now.
On an old person note, does anyone remember “jelly bracelets”? They were just, you know, circles but they came in different colors and Madonna wore them and I probably had about 300. When will we break this cycle of addiction????
You bet, Bohemond. When I was in sixth grade our teacher got upset–justifiably–at the baseball card market that was going on when she was trying to teach us. This being a certain number of years ago, all she said was that if the cards were out during academic time they’d be confiscated. She did this once…no need to mention who it was who was trying to deal off his surplus Gail Harris cards during math…and from then on we confined our trading (mostly) to recess, lunch, and before and after school.
When you start banning this sort of thing it may well lead the kids to conclude that bans on anything are just stupid, which may make it harder to protect them against real threats and problems. I dropped out of law and taught junior and senior high school for a couple of years a while back and one of the best pieces of advice I got was, “Pick your battles.”
The suggestion above that the bands be used as teaching tools is so obviously good that I doubt many teachers have tried it: “What proportion of Jane’s bands are blue? If Billy has x more than Ann and Ann has half as many as Joey…?”
Clausewitz (re item #16): I honestly don’t think anyone could have said it better, to wit: “If I do not have the ability to be more interesting than a rubber band….”
Unfortunately, too many teachers aren’t “more interesting than a rubber band” (I do so love the image that phrase evokes!), because too many of them approach their jobs from the wrong perspective. It is utterly impossible for a teacher to “make” students pay attention in class (I should know — I was a notorious ‘daydreamer’ throughout my school years; it was the one thing my teachers consistently noted on my report cards, from first grade through high school). You can’t force students to learn; they have to be seduced.
This is yet another example of the “zero-tolerance” idiocy that is sweeping the country’s schools, and it is nothing more than a self-granted dispensation by school administrators to abdicate the necessity of thinking. The policy is applied across-the-board, without regard for any extenuating circumstances or degree of severity. Does anyone seriously believe that drawing a picture of a gun is equivalent to marching into the cfeteria with a hunting rifle and mowing down your fellow students? Yet “zero-tolerance” policies treat the two scenarios as “morally equivalent”. This is stupidity on meth-laced triple espresso.
Incidents like this are the most compelling case for home-schooling I can imagine; what parent who gives a flying fiddler’s fark about his or her children would want them to be “educated” by these brainless prats?
And on an almost-but-not-quite totally unrelated note: any high-school principal (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Mr. Keller!) who refers to a student’s “high school career” needs to be given a few vocabulary drills of his own. That phrase gets on my last nerve!
This is marketing problem. The manufacturer should rename them Silly Condoms, and then all would be well.
I think it’s time to market a line of these with sayings from the Koran and the Bible and the Torah…
As a teacher, I understand that some kinds need to have their hands occupied. Just becuase they play with a toy does not mean that they are not being attentive. With that said, I remember that our school system had to ban jelly bracelets. Why? The kids attached sexual messages to the different colors. Need meant you were willing to do one sexual act, blue another and so on. Little girls who did not have a clue were being harrassed by inapropriate boys. It seems to me that if something is going to banes you should a good reason. Personally, I might give the bracelets out as prizes to kids who are able to conjugate then to be verbs correctly.
One important point that’s missed is that Silly Bandz are an expression of individuality within a collective, a means for these kids to standout without standing out. What the teachers are doing and do all too often is fail to recognize the need and necessity for children to become individuals through self-expression that is safe. By showing a desire to suppress this, they are acting like fuctionaries in an Orwellian state, where all must be the same or risk censure. As usual, educators failing in their basic task, to help individuals realize their potential in a collective society.
I just want to find out something special shapes of silly bands.