In 2014, pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom set out to better understand the student experience by sitting in on middle school classes. She sat. She sat some more. She then noticed that a day’s worth of sitting was affecting her ability to focus. She asked “how on Earth do these children tolerate sitting this long?” before spotting all the fidgety, distracted bodies – “well, the short answer is they don’t.”
This phenomenon is rooted in the commonly ignored factor that students are embodied. Those delicate brains we hope to educate are carried around in living, breathing vessels. Those bodies are built to move, but our young people are simply… not. Not enough, at least.
Hanscom’s experience is not unique. Fewer than 1 in 5 students are getting the recommended amount of exercise. That was before the COVID-19 pandemic and students were ushered into the slog of remote learning. It is only getting worse.
Mark Mattson, an adjunct professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, asserts that this sort of lifestyle “betrays the evolutionary history encoded in our genes” (Mattson, p.347). The counter-evolutionary construct of sedentary school days has the potential to make students bored, unfocused, and unhealthy, while contributing to a variety of psychological disorders, including anxiety.
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Source: Hit Consultant