Teachers: old habits die hard.

When your kids are very little, you hold their hand(s) when you are walking along the road.

As they grow and become more sure on their feet, you walk alongside them, dangling your hand fairly near theirs so that they have something to grab onto if they stumble, or in case you need to grab hold of them quickly. The distance between your hand and theirs becomes larger and larger as they grow up, and this instinct sort of fades to nothing by the time they are ten years old or so.

It's the same with teachers. On my way to work, I see a lot of school classes going on their school trips. When the kids are little (four or five years old) the teachers or responsible adults hold the hand of one child, followed by a few pairs of little kids all holding hands, and then comes the next adult with another little group of pairs of children and so on.

Teachers go through the same progression as parents, with seven or eight year old children, the teachers will walk alongside the crocodile with their child-side hand slightly outstretched at waist or hip level, making waving motions to encourage the children to stay on the pavement, to wait at the kerb or to speed up when crossing the road.

So the hand-holding with small children morphs into a hand-dangling gesture, which morphs into a sort of shepherding-arm-waving gesture, but the funny thing is that with teachers and school classes, it never seems to wear off. I see classes of teenage school children where the teachers and responsible adults are still making the vague arm-waving gestures as if they are trying to "push" the children along the road using some sort of force-field which the waving generates, even though they might be walking several feet away from the nearest child, and even though teenagers are the last people the teachers would dare physically push around.

Even the teachers bringing up the rear do the vague hand-waving, despite the fact that the teenagers in front can't see them. If you are watching from a distance, it all seems rather comical.