Picture this: it’s a beautiful morning at Ludlow High School. The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, and the sleep deprived student is making his way to class. At least, he’s trying to make his way to class. The problem is the hallways are jam-packed with students, each of them trying to make it to their respective classes. However, there is an obstacle. Some folks like to take full advantage of their four minutes in the hallway, despite other people around them. Whether it’s a group of unaware freshman or a love-engrossed couple, these people slow hallway traffic to a crawl. How is he as a student supposed to make his daily commute from class to class a bit smoother? There is a list of easy solutions and our senior patrol is definitely not number one.

Slow walking is aggravating but easily preventable. Let’s be real people, if you are walking through the English hallway and you can read all the sticky notes on the optimism board. YOU’RE WALKING TOO SLOW. The easiest way to solve this is just to walk with a purpose. If you walk slow enough to come to a complete stop to talk to your friends in the middle of the hallway, or to make out with your significant other because not seeing them for the last 45 minutes was too much to handle, you are evil. I don’t want to be harsh here, but it’s what everyone else in the hallway is thinking. I’m just trying to get to class, and I don’t have time to play red light green light in the hallway like it’s elementary school gym class. Lets just pick up the pace a little so that we all can just go to class and get through our day.

Now that’s not the entire issue. Some people are really trying to walk at a normal pace, but alas, they cannot. “Why can they not walk with an average gait and speed?” You ask. Well the truth is, you can’t get very far when there are students piled on top of each other throughout the hallways. The traffic is by far the worst near the main staircase, which is a staircase most of the students frequent due to its location in the middle of the school; giving students access to a multitude of hallways and classes galore. However, because of the number of users, we get a lot of traffic jams,most of the time students just end up at a complete stop in  the middle of the hallway because no one else can move. We already have a solution in place, but how well does it really work? It doesn’t work that well considering that even with it in place, we still continue to have all these traffic jams. Makes you wonder why we still have a senior patrol. Of course it can help the new freshmen navigate the halls during their first week or so but after that it’s on you if you don’t know how to walk in a hall.

Besides walking with a purpose and not stopping in the middle of the hallway for no reason, there is an easy way to fix our hallway hardships. You take the rules of the road, such as keeping to the right side of the hallway with an appropriate speed, and apply them to our hallways here at LHS, then we’re as good as gold. If you wouldn’t stop in the middle of the road for no reason, then you shouldn’t be stopping in the middle of the hallway. What a simple concept! At the end of the day, the point that I’m trying to get across is follow the simple rules of the hallway, and the simple rules of socializing.