What Is It About the Line?

Questioning one of school’s most enduring routines

Me and my class at age 10.

I have been thinking about lines.

Not lines on a page or lines we wait in at the grocery store, but those very particular human lines we create in elementary schools. Twenty or so children, one behind another, traveling together from one place to another.

What is it about the line?

My own memories of elementary school are complicated by the fact that my family moved several times. I attended first grade in three public schools in different U.S. states: North Carolina, Kentucky, and Massachusetts. I remember big schools, big children, and loud hallways. And I remember lining up.

Then, after our third move, I came home crying.

The transition into the third public school had been especially difficult, and my father decided something needed to change. So, in second grade, when I was eight years old, my parents enrolled me in a private school, more than an hour’s bus ride away.

And, strangely enough, one of the things I remember about that school is what we didn't do.

We didn't line up for everything.

At least, I don't remember lining up as part of the rhythm of our day. I remember only a few specific times: going onto a bus for a field trip, waiting to go through the cafeteria line, or coming in from recess after it suddenly began to rain and the floors might be dangerous to walk on.

However, what I recall us doing most of the time is that when we finished a lesson or activity, we gathered our belongings and moved on. We went to lunch. We went outside for recess. We went to another class. There may have been bells after lunch and recess—I can't remember all the details more than fifty years later—but I remember quite clearly the feeling that getting where I needed to go was largely my responsibility.

At eight.

I had a schedule. I knew where I was supposed to be. I finished what I was doing, gathered my things, and went there.

Apparently, this suited me very well.

I wonder sometimes whether my classmates remember it the same way. Did they notice that we weren't being organized into lines? Did it feel unusual to them? Or did it simply feel like school?

For me, it felt natural.

Now, after more than thirty years as an educator, working in seven different countries, I find myself thinking about that experience differently.

Because I have spent an extraordinary amount of my professional life trying to get children to walk in lines.

And I am not very good at it.

There. I've said it.

Every teacher has things that seem to come naturally and other things that require enormous amounts of energy. Teachers often talk about the paperwork, documentation, assessment, reporting, meetings, and endless administrative demands that consume their time.

For me, if I lined up—no pun intended—the parts of teaching that have consistently challenged me, somewhere near the top would be this:

Getting children to stay in a line and walk quietly from one place to another.

It isn't because I haven't tried.

As an elementary teacher, I frequently looked for ways around the traditional transition. I developed what I thought of as "soft endings" and "soft starts." Rather than having twenty children stop what they were doing at precisely the same moment, pack up simultaneously, form a line, and wait for everyone else, I tried whenever possible to let transitions happen more naturally.

Finish what you're doing.

Put away your things.

Get yourself ready.

Move on to what's next.

Whenever I could avoid moving an entire group of children en masse from one place to another, I did.

But, of course, sometimes there is a line.

And over the years, I think I have tried just about everything.

With younger children, I have used storytelling and imagination. We might walk down the hallway in a particular way, imagining ourselves somewhere else or using descriptive words to guide how we moved. Those strategies can work beautifully with first, second, and even third graders.

Then comes fourth grade.

And fifth grade.

The magic wears off.

So we talked about it.

Why do we need to walk safely in the hallway?

Why do we need to respect the learning happening in other classrooms?

Why do we keep our hands to ourselves?

Why does it matter?

I've shown children videos of other children transitioning successfully. I've taken videos of my own students and shown the videos back to them. We've watched ourselves. We've discussed what worked and what didn't. We've reflected. We've practiced.

And, yes, especially in my younger teaching years, I sometimes relied on the more traditional tools of teacher authority. I raised my voice. I tried rewards. I tried consequences. I tried to create enough concern about what might happen if the line didn't behave that perhaps the line would behave. I changed my vocabulary to “walk slowly” instead of “don’t run.” In Morocco, I learned to speak in French while herding middle school students into a cafeteria line, saying, “Jeux de mains, jeux de vilains” (“rough play leads to trouble”).

These efforts worked..

For a while.

Then they didn’t.

Then someone turned around.

Someone touched someone.

Someone remembered something absolutely essential that needed to be communicated to the person three places behind them.

Someone moved beside someone else.

And once again:

"Please face forward."

"Please keep your hands to yourself."

"Please walk."

"Please stop talking."

"Please stay in the line."

And somewhere along the way, I started wondering how much time and energy we spend on this.

Not just mine.

The children's.

If I added up all the minutes I have spent during more than thirty years of education teaching, reminding, correcting, rewarding, redirecting, discussing, practicing, and sometimes becoming frustrated about children walking in a line, what would that number be?

And what exactly have we been trying to teach?

I also wonder when the line became such an unquestioned expectation of school. Or perhaps that is the wrong question. Perhaps it became an expectation simply because it is what schools have always done. Teachers line children up because teachers before them lined children up, and eventually a routine becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it is a choice.

How many practices in schools are like that? Things we continue not because we have consciously decided they are the best way to help children learn, grow, or become independent, but because they are simply part of what school looks like? Maybe the line is one of those ordinary routines worth noticing again—and questioning.

Of course, there may be good reasons it has endured. Schools have become larger. There may simply be too many children moving through crowded spaces to trust everyone to manage themselves safely. Perhaps we have decided that children need more adult regulation because they don't yet have the self-regulation to move independently. But then I wonder: if we continually regulate them, when do they have the opportunity to develop that self-regulation?

And then there is safety. The meaning of keeping children safe at school has changed during my lifetime. We are more conscious of bullying, of children who may be vulnerable when they are out of an adult's sight, and, painfully, of threats that can come from outside the school itself. Perhaps our understandable desire to know where every child is—and to keep them within our sight and supervision—has also changed how much independence we are willing to give them. I wonder whether, in trying so hard to keep children safe, we sometimes remove opportunities for them to practice navigating their world safely on their own.

There are, of course, real reasons for organizing children as they move through schools. There are safety considerations. There are crowded buildings. There are other classes learning. There are twenty children and one adult who needs to know where those twenty children are.

I understand all of that.

I'm not advocating for opening the classroom door and simply hoping everyone turns up somewhere eventually.

But I keep coming back to my own experience at eight years old.

Someone trusted us.

We learned where we were supposed to be. We learned to watch the time. We learned to finish what we were doing, gather our things, and move on. We learned how to navigate a school. We learned that getting ourselves from one place to another was, at least partly, our responsibility.

And somehow, we did.

Perhaps that is why, all these years later, the line still feels unnatural to me.

Perhaps I have spent much of my career trying to become better at something that, somewhere deep inside, I have never completely believed children need as much as we think they do.

Or perhaps I'm simply not very good at managing lines.

At this point in my career, I'm willing to surrender to that possibility too.

But I do wonder what might happen if we took some of the time and energy we spend teaching children how to move through a school under our direct supervision and used it instead to teach them how to move through it responsibly without us.

Maybe the question isn't how we can finally perfect the line.

Maybe the question is why, after all these years, we remain so committed to it.

More than fifty years after that eight-year-old girl learned to gather her things, look at where she needed to go next, and get herself there, I'm still wondering:

What is it about the line?