Stand Up Project
By the Class 81 Student Documentary Committee: Hannah, Charlotte, Zanira, Angela, Elyse, Katharine
Take a seat. Please sit down. As students we hear these commands countless times throughout our days at school. Having people sit down has become such a simple and ubiquitous method of maintaining organization in classroom and workplace settings---it’s become part of society in such a way that we don’t even need to think about it anymore.
But when our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Guinane, shared some of the recent statistics about health issues related to sitting for long periods, we were shocked. None of the students in our class were very surprised that long periods of inactivity would negatively impact health---our school, as a Health and Wellness Academy, encourages physical activity all the time as an aspect of healthy living---but sitting for long periods of time is exactly what we do at school every day. Our school is set up for sitting: the benches in the cafeteria, the rows of desks and “seating arrangements” in the classrooms, the chairs lined up in front of each computer in the lab, the couches in the library. We are expected to sit for basically every class except for gym.
We started brainstorming ideas and asking questions about what we could do to make students’ experience at school a healthier one. We knew not everyone would be convinced at first---the teachers especially might be skeptical about classroom management with students standing up. So, we decided to start with our own class to see how it would go.