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Memoirs of a SLACer

sociological views on life and the liberal arts

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Is teaching exercise? Apparently not

March 26, 2015 by John

If you, like me, tend to pace when you’re teaching then, you, like me, may have wondered how much walking you actually do during class. The other day I realized that my phone has some fitness tracking tools so I decided to find out. Keep in mind that the day I measured my classroom walking was actually a best-case scenario for this activity, since it involved my students working on group projects while I walked around the room and answered questions. While my typical pacing may cover a range of 10-20 feet at the front of a classroom, then, on this day I was untethered, able to walk around for 75 minutes. Am I getting a ton of exercise by pacing at the front of the room?

No. No, I am not. On this “best-case” day I took a total of 264 steps while in the classroom. 264! That is nothing! I assumed that I took 264 steps to walk down the hallway to the bathroom. How many miles did I walk during this time? .11. The previous sentence is 11 being hugged by two periods. It is being hugged because it is so sad about how little distance I actually walk in class. I was expecting results that numbered in miles, not tenths of miles!

There are two things that I have learned from this experience. The first is that teaching does not count as exercise, even if it gets me on my feet once or twice a day. The second is that my perceptions of the amount of walking one can do in a classroom was horribly inaccurate. I suppose that it is better to know that I should not count teaching as my daily exercise, but I will miss the illusion that I am walking miles everyday just by pacing.

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Posted in A Sporting Chance, Teaching Tricks | Tagged Exercise in the Classroom, Memoirs of a SLACer, Pedometers, Teaching Exercise |

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