A Georgia teacher’s viral “fart corner” has educators and parents divided over her classroom innovation.
Candy Sydney-Browning, 36, set up the so-called “gas station” for her second-grade class at Dobbs Elementary School in Atlanta, she told TODAY.com in a story published Tuesday. The designated area, complete with air freshener sprays and a hand-lettered sign reading “gusty winds area,” lets students relieve themselves without disrupting lessons or drawing unwanted attention.
“I have a very weak stomach, so I cannot take it,” Sydney-Browning said of the smell that prompted her creation. “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.”
The corner eliminates the need for students to ask permission and miss instruction time, she explained. It also removes the stigma around a natural bodily function that had previously caused classroom chaos.
“I don’t have to stop teaching in order to say yes. You can go,” she said. “The students inside the classroom, they don’t lose any instruction. They can continue to learn. It’s a win-win situation.”
Before the fart corner, gas breaks had become a source of distraction and blame-shifting among her young students, Sydney-Browning noted.
“They were like, ‘He did it, she did it,'” she recalled of the old dynamic. “And they’ll point fingers and they’ll try to move away from each other.”
Sydney-Browning shared her classroom setup in a playful TikTok video that quickly spread across the platform, drawing both praise and skepticism from viewers. As of Friday, the video had accumulated more than 460,000 likes.
“This is genius and normalizing body functions without disturbing the classroom amazing,” one commenter wrote on the post.
A fellow teacher proclaimed their own version of the concept: “I teach middle school and we have a fart closet.”
Others questioned whether the corner truly solved the problem it aimed to address.
“The rest of the class stays focused while somebody is farting in the corner???” one skeptical commenter asked.
“I’d be so embarrassed with the whole class knowing I’m getting up to go fart,” another added.
The viral moment comes as teachers nationwide continue to share creative classroom management hacks on social media, with some gaining massive audiences for their unconventional approaches to everyday school challenges. Sydney-Browning’s solution joins a growing catalog of teacher-generated content that blends humor with practical pedagogy, though few have centered on a topic quite so elemental.
In the viral moment that started it all, Sydney-Browning posted footage of her classroom layout showing the designated corner with its air fresheners and “gusty winds area” signage, followed by additional clips explaining how students use the space. The videos captured her straightforward philosophy: bodily functions happen, especially among young children, and building structure around them beats pretending they don’t exist.
Sydney-Browning’s TikTok following has grown substantially since the fart corner videos took off, with educators and parents continuing to debate the merits of her approach in comment threads across her account.