When nature calls in one Georgia classroom, students have a designated place to answer: the fart corner.
Candy Sydney-Browning, a second-grade teacher in Atlanta, has gone viral on TikTok for creating a “gas station” where students can discreetly step away to pass gas without leaving the classroom or disrupting the lesson.
Sydney-Browning, 36, marks the spot with a neon-yellow “gusty winds area” traffic sign and keeps plenty of air freshener nearby.
The unconventional setup has racked up more than 4 million views on TikTok – and thousands of mixed reactions. Many called it genius, while others wondered whether a room full of second-graders could really ignore a classmate making a trip to the fart corner.
“Wait no, I love this. It creates comfort around normal bodily functions and reduces shame brings about a silly little thing,” said one commenter.
“This is absolutely amazing. Normalizing body functions and not letting them make it something to make fun of each other for,” another said.
Others said they would be mortified to use such a setup.
“When I was a kid, farting in class was a social death sentence… kids these days, man,” one person wrote.
“I’d be so embarrassed with the whole class knowing I’m getting up to go fart,” another said.
Sydney-Browning said the idea is less about farting than keeping students focused and making them comfortable handling a normal bodily function appropriately.
“I have a very weak stomach, so I cannot take it,” Sydney-Browning told Today.com. “And so I was like, OK, I’m just gonna create this little area over here, and you just get up, you go over there, do your business, come back, and that’s just it.”
She said students previously would point fingers and try to move away from one another whenever someone passed gas during class.
“They were like, ‘He did it, she did it,’” Sydney-Browning said. “And they’ll point fingers and they’ll try to move away from each other.”
Her response was to make clear that passing gas is normal, but students should excuse themselves rather than do it around their classmates.
“It’s normal,” she told them. “But you have to excuse yourself.”
The designated area means students do not have to raise their hands or wait for permission. They can simply get up, walk to the back of the classroom, use the area and return to the lesson.
“While I’m teaching, no one has to ask,” Sydney-Browning explained in a TikTok showing the setup. “I don’t have to stop teaching in order to say yes. You can go.”
She said the arrangement also keeps students from missing instruction.
“The student inside the classroom, they don’t lose any instruction,” she said. “They can continue to learn. It’s a win-win situation.”
The idea returned this year after a student in the viral video asked where the classroom's “gas station” would be. Sydney-Browning had used the setup when she taught first grade and brought it back after moving with her students into second grade.
The first student to actually use the station had “a very troubled stomach,” Sydney-Browning said. Some classmates turned around and smiled, but she said no one made fun of him or pointed fingers.
“It just became a norm,” she told Today.
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