We were joking in the office recently about our old school desks. It was a one-piece thing with a desk no larger than a TV tray, complete with a little carved out groove where you placed your No. 2 pencil. The seat, which forced you to be a contortionist just to get into, doubled as a locker for your books, snacks, love notes, coat, gloves and ear muffs. It was a dangerous place, too, as thieves often visited your seat at night – or during recess – and stole items, usually that book report you had ready to give to the teacher. Or was it just me?
Those desks could also protect us from an F5 tornado, or even better, nuclear fallout, if you didn’t have time to make it to the hall. Sitting against the wall while holding a science book over your head was the true way to stave off those darn nuclear attacks.
I have not been in many school music departments since my grade school days. Who am I kidding? We didn’t have a music department. We had a trunk in the corner of the room where you prayed to God above you were chosen to play something cool like the drum, which was basically a tambourine on a stick. You held it with one hand and held one drumstick in the other. That was still far better than being stuck with the triangle. If you ever had to hold the small metal, well, triangle and tap it with the small metal stick in front of your peers, you know the meaning of humiliation.
We were encouraged to run like crazy kids during recess, or what we called P.E. (physical education). We would return for about one class before lunch. By lunchtime, the sweat had dried on our clothes and the whole classroom smelled like an NFL locker room without an air conditioner to sweep the odor away. Of course, with some of the food I remember being served at my Alabama elementary, perhaps not being able to smell the food over everyone’s body odor was a plus. There was obviously no Italian working in our cafeteria as we had the worst spaghetti – way too often – on planet Earth.
But, for the most part, we were fit.
Four first grade classrooms at a Texas elementary school were equipped with desks that allowed students to stand or sit on a stool. The thought – and hope – is that the children who stand at their desks will burn more calories than those who sit all day, thus helping fight childhood obesity.
The students or teachers were told the reason for the standing desks. A six-week study found that 70 percent of the students never used their stools and the other 30 percent stood the majority of the time.
So much for wanting your students to sit and be still.
The American Journal of Public Health published an article stating adults were at fault for wanting kids to be “sedentary.”
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines sedentary as “doing or requiring much sitting; characterized by a lack of physical activity.” There’s that, but more to the point, there is “what Kyle does on college football Saturdays.” Yes, I’m already in mid-season form perfecting the heck out of being sedentary.
“Most students want to be standing, to be moving,” said Monica Wendel, co-author of the study and director of the Center for Community Health Development at the Texas A&M Health Science Center. “They don’t want to sit still. It’s against their nature. We are the ones who teach them to be sedentary.”
The research found that students that were particularly heavy, those in the 85th percentile for weight based on age and gender, burned 32 percent more calories than similar students that used traditional desks.
For those that wonder how a child can remain focused while standing, the study showed that standing improved the students’ attention, on-task behavior, alertness and classroom behavior.