Colleagues and I who are more deskbound than individuals who teach P.E. have joked about, I mean entertained the thought of, teaching walk jog run classes.

We should be able to do it, even if our advanced degrees are in accounting, biology, or English. A fact that many faculty do not know is that in order to teach non-transferable activity classes, at least so we have been told, it is not necessary to have an advanced degree and your major does not have to be P.E.

It seems like a really good deal to teach those activity classes. We are even willing to team teach, to split that pay check while we teach people how to walk, jog, run, or any of the three options. Besides, while making sure we maintain our integrity and do not perform two job functions synchronously, we would adjust our work schedule so that the students can walk, jog, run, while we sit in our offices and perform duties related to our primary job function. Bob will grade those lab sheets, Fred will reconcile the balance sheets, and I will read the five-paragraph themes. And Biff and Buffy will run their little hearts out.

But we want to be more involved with our walk jog run students than doing the equivalent job of a junior high coach throwing the kids a ball and telling them to have at it (at least that’s how it was in the good old days). So with help from our accountant colleague, we have come up with record keeping that will allow us to enter the time, distance, and progress made by every student. Never mind that you can probably buy such software, but each member of the teaching trio wants to feel he is contributing something to the walk jog run class.

Bob, who is a runner when he is not defrosting sheep heads for class, is giving a guest lecture or two about the anatomy of the human body as it relates to running and, even more important, offering a clinic on how to prevent and treat running injuries.

I have gone online and assembled various articles and blogs from Runner’s World and I am reviewing the MLA format with the walk jog run students so they have a leg up when they write a term paper to give the walk jog run an extra academic kick (please pardon the awful puns; they are painful like running on a concrete running track).

Between the three of us, we have figured we could easily rake in $30,000 a year teaching walk jog run on the side, especially if we get do the walk jog run classes online.

Another idea, because once you start thinking about teaching a class, the ideas just start flying, is that we will be able to get our exercise in while getting paid at the same time. Exercising with the students will be part of an inspirational, participatory teaching and learning style.

This just in from the P.E. department. We are making too much out of a class such as walk jog run. We should leave it to the professionals. We had suggested an exchange program, where the walk jog run instructors would come work in English, accounting, and biology, but there have been no takers.

Now all that comes to mind is that country song, “Mind Your Own Business.”