Sometimes, college crams so much new information in your head so fast that you start to feel like you’re forgetting stuff you already know.

I know you know what I mean, because, looking around campus, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that some of you have forgotten how to walk.

Not that any of you are crawling the halls or moving about via the forgotten art of skipping. You’ve simply forgotten that with walking comes the responsibility to actually move. Not just to move, but to move quickly, in a manner that does not keep you squarely in my way while I’m trying to get to class.

In the early hours of the morning – as many of us are trying to dash to our first classes – there is a small collection of factors that seem to conspire to make us late. So I’m going to go over the ground rules here. Here are some simple rules that should, if followed correctly, keep my elbows away from the back of your slow-moving head:

– Keep to the right. Some of you don’t have cars, and I suppose some of you may be from places where things function differently, so I’ll just clue you in to this fact: Around these parts, traffic keeps to the right. I’ve got too much to do to be slowed down by your impression of a salmon swimming against the current. There’s a reason everybody else is going that same direction.

– Walk faster. I know you probably spent hours perfecting that “pimp walk” of yours in the mirror, and, golly, how we’re all impressed by it. But if you could start putting one leg in front of the other in a more traditional fashion, you might be shocked to find that the sound of me calling you names under my breath goes away. And you might just get where you’re going a little faster.

– Open up. I get that DuSable Hall is an older building, but something should really be done about the doors in the hallways. Some of the doors in the hallways don’t want to prop open, something which restricts the flow of traffic and could also prove to be dangerous if there’s a fire or other emergency that would send people running. Luckily, there’s this fancy new technology called “a triangle-shaped piece of wood” that would probably fix that for us. If somebody could get on that, it’d be great. Open classroom doors sticking out into the hallway or lines of people backing up while someone opens a stairwell door are also problems.

– Watch where you’re going. Twice today, I had people back into me because they were too busy having a conversation to watch what they were doing. There are hundreds of us crammed into tight spaces during the day, so it’s in your own best interests to be a little more careful.

– Go to the mat. While somebody’s off getting those triangle-shaped pieces of wood, if they could also pick up a few extra floor mats, that’d be great. Every time it rains or snows around here, the tile floor in these buildings turns into the world’s largest Slip ‘N Slide. That’s something with the potential for slapstick comedy in the hallways, but a broken neck on the stairs. If somebody could set things up so that water doesn’t get carried most of the way into the building, people could move faster and safer.

Anyway, those are my 12 cents (adjusted for inflation). If we could all band together and follow these simple rules, you won’t end up with someone else’s footprints on the back of your coat.