From Chewbacca Mom to Pen Pineapple Apple Pen, the internet has brought us many joys over the course of this school year. Along with those internet memes came challenges like the mannequin challenge.
“My favorite challenge of the year was the mannequin challenge because you didn’t have to do anything. You just stood as still as possible, and that got you out of doing classwork for a few minutes,” freshman Matthew Hopper said. “My entire German class did it, and I was the person videotaping it.”
While the premise of the mannequin challenge is simple, many people took the challenges to another level by adding their own twists to it, like celebrities or incorporating other trends.
“I loved Taylor Swift’s mannequin challenge; that was probably the best one that I saw. She got a lot of her celebrity friends to join her on the beach, and so of course that helped the video’s popularity and the challenge’s popularity,” sophomore Megan Roberts said. “Pretty much everyone I know did the challenge, but the best ones were the videos that took it and made it their own.”
Another popular challenge was the water bottle flip challenge, made famous when high schooler Michael Senatore flipped a bottle into the air and had it land right side up at his school’s talent show.
“Everybody could do cool tricks with water bottles like landing the bottles on their caps and flipping them onto super high places. I never actually got a bottle to land. I was pretty bad at it,” Roberts said. “Eventually teachers got mad at people doing it all the time and distracting the class, and the trend died down anyway.”
The mannequin challenge and water bottle flip challenge may have made some teachers mad with the distraction, but they were not dangerous. However, there were challenges like the backpack challenge, which seriously harmed students across the nation.
“The backpack challenge was probably the stupidest thing I did this year. It’s that challenge where you run down a line of students and everyone throws their backpack at you, hoping to knock you down. I did that once, and I had bruises all over for a while,” Hopper said. “It was a lot more fun when you were the one throwing the bags.”
Teachers had a different take on challenges in the classroom. Many of the challenges interrupted class time, or led to distracted students.
“The water bottle flip challenge was distracting for my classes, and I don’t like the sound of water bottles crinkling anyway, so I was glad when that whole trend was over,” Science teacher Amy Van Matre-Woodward said. “The backpack challenge didn’t surprise me, that’s just typical freshman boy behavior. It was dangerous, but so is a lot of other stuff that happens in the middle school and high school.”
Despite the potential risks involved, the adrenaline associated with successfully completing the challenges contributes to their exponential popularity.
“I think there’s a lot that goes into a good challenge, but one of the main ones is that it has to be basic, basic enough that everyone can replicate it and make it their own,” freshman Jake Juenger said. “Of course, the more people that do it, the bigger it becomes, but it also just has to be fun enough for people to want to do it. That’s what makes a good challenge.”