This sketch from November of 2018 is a an example of how my thinking and reading can influence how I am see students. Specifically, the more I watch and listen to students move in the classroom the deeper my wondering about why/how/if the allowances for free and social movement in a classroom is more stimulating on the adolescent brain...or more of an opportunity to be distracted...or both. And...to what might that mean or say about my decisions as a teacher?
Much continues to be chronicled regarding why/how walking, movement, and collaboration generates gains in physical health and gains as a creative thinker.
For example, Twyla Tharp posits in The Creative Habit that movement benefits our brains more than we understand. And I read that Steve Jobs was a walker. Virginia Woolf, walker. Ditto for Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Tchiakovsky, Mary Oliver, Nietschke, Annie Dillard, Walt Whitman, Wordsworth....
Perhaps the history of and current reality of walking outside of the classroom influences the limitations of movement inside of the classroom.
For that, I need to know more about the functional and aesthetic functions of where people have walked, walk today, and will walk in the future. I have to consider gender and race--is everyone afforded the same freedoms to walk where and when they please? (Clearly not).
And the reality of clearly not extends into public education. Of course, this is only one of many deep-rooted realities remaining in our classrooms, and while it is not at the top of the list of changes that must come in education, I do suspect that our Spartan diet of minimal adolescent movement in schools is connected to some of the more disagreeable realities present in the system.