To be frank, I don’t love the snow all that much, it wasn’t my favorite as a kid, and as I get older the amount of hassle it brings forth really isn’t outweighed by the benefits of it in my eyes.
But what I do love is a snow day. There are not many things better than an unplanned day off of school, where you aren’t sick, you don’t have appointments, and you can simply enjoy a day without school or any other responsibilities. As Junior Annalise Schwarz put it, “Not only is the snow nice, but it’s also a nice mental reset.”
Living in Maryland, we often do not get too many snow days, at least in our county, so when we do get a day where there’s a significant amount of snow, it is something that hopefully can get us out of school for a well-needed break. Nowadays, we don’t sit around the radio waiting to hear if it’s a snow day, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to be a part of our childhoods as well. Online school during inclement weather days is unnecessary, and even if it wasn’t, it should at least function.
The virtual education day was lackluster to say the least. Myself, as well as many others, did not get into Brightspace at all during first period. According to English teacher Ms. Sara Dehn, “I could not log into Brighspace. So I had my Google Meet link already posted…Morning of I was unable to log in.”
These experiences were common and frustrating, which emphasized not only how poorly prepared we were but also how underwhelming Brightspace was. Schwarz commented on Brighstpace, “I don’t mind Brightspace, but I feel like there’s more successful programs, like Google Classroom was more user friendly in comparison.” Freshman McKinley Davey felt similarly, and said that, “While Brightspace can be useful for teachers to have everything in one place and saves trees, I think Brightspace is unhelpful and often doesn’t work.”
Ms. Dehn, however, did comment that she did not dislike Brighstpace, but did say that it, “Has a lot of hoops to jump through.” Ms. Dehn also aimed to emphasize the frustration in the community as both a parent and a teacher, that these new options of learning in days of inclement weather, really should imply that decisions are being made earlier, finding out between all of these options morning of can be overwhelming.
By second period I was able to get in, but AP Calculus is a difficult class to teach over Zoom. We had to learn a new topic in order to stay on pace with the curriculum, but doing that with little notice was not conducive to an effective lesson introducing a complex topic. We ended up just doing independent work on a simple topic, which really could have been doing asynchronously.
Historically, days missed for snow were just that, missed. As a society we have missed all these days, and they were a part of American culture, and it really would be a shame to see them go. And while it has been expressed that the current stance is not to get rid of snow days, but the precedent that this set is nevertheless going to be impactful for the years to come. We may not be all that many years away from the end of snow days.
As we progress as a society, education improves and the amount that children are learning has increased, if days were acceptable to be missed in years past, it should be just as manageable now, with a more extensive curriculum.
