walk this way

As a follow up to last night's post, you're gonna get more pointless stories of my youth. That'll teach you.

I went to Catholic elementary school, grades one to eight, in a very small school attached to the Polish church that my parents belonged to and my father actually attended. Being a very small and poor school, we did not have much in the way of actual amenities. Which was fine. They managed to teach me things like reading and grammar without amenities. (I know it's not immediately apparent in this blog, but I *can* write a perfectly grammatical sentence when I put my mind to it. Really.) But one of the amenities we did not have was a gym. We had a tiny schoolyard that they let us out to run around on at recess and lunch, and in bad weather, we just stayed in, got restless, and drove our teachers insane.

But at some point in my school career--I want to say around fourth grade, because I really don't remember it happening before then--someone in authority made the executive decision that we would take a stab at occasionally having "gym." What this worked out to was that on nice days, if our teachers were in the mood, they'd walk us to one of the two huge parks/fields about ten or fifteen minutes (of kid-speed walking) from the school. One of these was a city field; the other was owned by the local Big Corporation. (They actually connected, though they were in opposite directions. Imagine a giant square with my school at the lower right corner, the entrance of one park being at the upper right corner and the entrance of the other at the lower left corner, and the two parks connecting in an L shape. Got that?)

I don't remember much of any actual organized activity once we got to the park. The city park had a small playground with monkeybars and swings and a merry-go-round, so when we were still of an age to use that, we would. The boys would do whatever it is boys do when you let them go free-range. And definitely by seventh grade, the girls would mostly sit on the bleachers and talk about which boys were cute. But even so, even when our coolness dictated that we would sit in the bleachers and gossip and act bored rather than run about the field, we still got in that 20 or 30 minutes of walking during the school day, plus all the walking we did otherwise.

My point being, we loved it. We loved getting out of the school building during the middle of the day, getting some air, not feeling cooped up and having to just sit at our stupid desks. And kids don't mind walking as transportation. Kids generally like moving their bodies when they're given the chance. And frankly, our teachers liked it too. It gave them the opportunity not to teach when they didn't feel like it, they liked the fresh air on a nice day too, and it tired us the hell out and made us more docile when we went back. Win-win.

So I totally think that my 40-minute-walk during schooltime for elementary school kids is a viable tool in the War Against Fat America. Someone ought to put me in charge of running something. I'd straighten this country right out.

xoxo