Silly Bandz Banned

I had seen them for a while, but it was flying under my radar. Little colorful shaped bands that kids are wearing around their wrists. Well, they got on my radar in a big way when one of my students wouldn't take his off during class. Oh, he did indeed take off, especially after I told him that if he didn't I'd yank it off him and eat it. They are Silly Bandz and I'm not the only one with a bit of aggravation over them. Seems kids are more worried about them than their school work and have gotten into fights over them.

So the horrible old schools and their shortsighted, soul-breaking methods have banned the bandz. (Cue "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd.)

This is a travesty! How dare teachers try to remove something the children love! Its school! Those children need to be able to express themselves! You know what bans like this lead to? SCHOOL UNIFORMS! How dare the schools take away distracting things from children for the sake of trying to educate the little cherubs! I'm outraged!

Oh wait... I'm not.

Its school, people. And while school is important for kids to interact with their peers and form social skills, the kids have got to make the grade. I don't like the No Child Left Behind crap that has gotten schools to stat worrying more about test scores than actually educating kids. I don't want my kids to be turned into test taking little monkeys. Unfortunately that's how it is now and teachers are pressured to make sure their kids perform well. Its easy to say that the teachers are looking out for their own jobs getting rid of distractions like these in the classroom so the kids will test better and the teacher will keep their job. But what about the teachers that are there to actually teach the kids? The ones trying excite the students about learning. They've got to compete with stupid pieces of plastic that seem to be causing a real problem.

Newsflash: kids aren't in school to express themselves through fashion. They are there to, supposedly, learn something.