During a walk and talk, have you ever thought about drifting away into the donut and not coming back to class? If you do, you might wonder why we have this privilege in school?
The origin of walk and talks can be traced back to retired history teacher Tim Provost.
“In 1998 he started doing them because his wife was an elementary teacher, and they had gotten a lot of neuroscience backed information at her school about how important movement breaks were for students’ attentiveness and mental engagement,” said history teacher Brittany Larson.
As classes transitioned back to in-person after COVID, more teachers adopted walk and talks to help ease their students into the new format.
“Students had a really hard time sitting because they were used to being able to move around whenever they wanted and they also had a hard time socializing with each other, like people had been so isolated,” said Larson. “And so I think more teachers in other departments at the school maybe adopted it after that time, because students kind of just couldn’t handle the normal 90 minute experience.”
In other schools, like Lake Oswego High School, they do not have walk and talks even though they have the same length periods. Some teachers have multiple opinions on whether walk and talks are necessary. Some teachers might see walking and talking as a distraction and a waste of time, others might think it’s important for maintaining their students’ concentration.
“With math, we usually have to end up teaching bell to bell, especially with precalc and higher level classes,” said math teacher Teresa Lehto.
There is lots of material that needs to be covered, so if students keep drifting away, it’s hard for teachers to bring them back.
“So I tend not to have the time to let students go have a walk and talk. Oh, gotta wrangle up the kids who magically didn’t make it back,” said Lehto.
Students abuse walk and talks sometimes which makes teachers doubt the necessity of walk and talks.
Sometimes, if you really want to use the restroom and your classmate takes 20 minutes of a bathroom break, that could be very frustrating.
“[Teachers have noticed] students tend to do that independently,” said Lehto.
The walk and talks among the LHS campus has been a tradition since 1998, however the privilege might be taken away if we keep abusing the privilege.
