Of all the silly trends this one sounds very benign. They aren't hurting anyone. No one is bullied. They don't sound particularly loud or distracting to others not interested.
Coin boys, keep doing your thing. Even if I'm not into it, be the most awesome Coin boy you can today.
Its the teachers bitch corner. Of course they're going to complain about kids finding something to keep occupied with.
Instead of, yknow, not being able to keep kids from bullying others into suicide. That's not worth having a grumble over, after all. They're not paid to care that much.
Some people just need to vent to coworkers about mild shit. They do care about bullying, at least some, but they can still vent. If they aren't taking it out on the students, not punishing them or complaining to parents, it's perfectly fine to vent to coworkers.
I do IT work and I vent about customers, but I still love helping people, and I don't let anything I find weird or annoying about them affect my level of service. Just yesterday I was chatting with my coworker about people asking us to shortcut minor issues (reducing a two click process to one click). It seems minor to us, and seems like a waste of time, but if they do that process 600 times a day that's 600 clicks instead of 1200. So we grumble to ourselves but we still do it.
Kids have always had a thing. This is not new. When I was in school 40 fucking years ago, Christ I’m old, there was a yo yo phase, a rubber band / paperclip phase, a bloody knuckles phase. I’m sure more that I’ve forgotten.
"Pencil Break" was the hot shit for about a year in middle school. This was right on the edge of when mechanical pencils started to replace wooden ones in school (not completely, I'm sure kids still use wooden #2s.)
It was stupid, but so many people would take turns slapping pencils together to see which ones would break. Obviously brand new pencils out of the box snap the easiest, while worn down nubs are impossible to break. The school eventually banned it and briefly flirted with banning wooden pencils after parents and teachers complained that all the really dedicated students had no writing instruments left.
At my school there was a group of students who would steal unattended pencils and hoard them in a huge pile in a hole in the woods behind the school. Eventually they got caught but for a while it was easy to make the excuse that you couldn't do schoolwork because the pencils were gone.
I forgot about the bloody knuckles. You either got good at spinning a quarter, or you got good at taking pain.
There's a YT channel MrRebootFTW that Google fed to me where a guy goes through all of the old school tricks and how to do them. It's silly. Things like spitball guns, shooting paperclips or folded paper with rubber bands, rubber band guns with old mechanical pencils, and a bunch of other things. It's a fun nostalgia watch if you're into it.
Not sinks, but somee asshat in my high school wrecked two entire bathrooms, one boys one girls, by throwing a chunk of sodium down a toilet while it was flushing. The sodium exploded and blew all the toilets off the wall. This was back in 94-96.
Ehh, I think it's more fair to say we had our turn at making up abbreviations that made sense in our world as it briefly existed.
That commercial "IDK, my BFF Jill?" Was targeted at us, but 100 years ago telegraphers and ham radio operators were inventing abbreviations and slang in Morse code. 73 OM
As someone who loves random chance, I would gladly take that over them filming themselves on social media committing crimes like the average teenage t|kt0k user loves to do from what I hear, I swear.
I'll have to look into that. Never heard of it. I'm sadly one of the adults who doesn't read as much as I should from books/ebooks. I'm working on changing that, so I'll absolutely look into this.