It has been a rough spring for students. Our kids have been stuck in their houses, only able to see their friends from six feet away, and missed out on music, drama, sports and the many other parts that bring them joy. So I realize this is probably not good timing on my part, but I have some more bad news.
Kids – there may be no more snow days.
I feel like I am sucking the joy from one of society’s great rituals. The “snow day” has been part of life as long as any of us can remember. Often allusive, at least where I grew up and live today, the snow day is legendary. As students we would carefully follow the 6:00 evening news forecasts and see the chance of snow in the long-range reports. And then track that and talk to our friends, could it really be, might we really get a SNOW DAY. And on those very rare occasions, we would wake up very early in the morning, rush to the window to see the streets covered in snow, and our parents come in and tell us they heard on the radio there is no school, it is a snow day. And what a day. It was this bonus unexpected holiday in the middle of a winter wonderland. People would get older and say things like, “remember the snow day of ’85 – that was a great day.”
All good things must come to an end.
The premise behind the snow day is that learning and schooling happens in a building. In a building where teachers and students gather about 190 times a year. If the teachers and students can’t get together in the building, you can’t have learning and schooling. Thus, the snow day.
But things have changed. Of course, they have really been changing for a while. Technology has broken this rule. For close to two decades more and more students have been learning online and teachers have been instructing online. And we have spoken about blended learning, where learning moved between home and school. That said, we have never had a real urgency to fully embrace a new model. The pandemic has changed this. Now almost all students have been on remote learning for 9 weeks. In some ways, it has been 9 weeks of snow days. It has been challenging, stressful, exciting and uneven. And it has started to make us question the future of schooling – next month, next year and forever going forward (this is a bigger topic that will need more space another time).
I am struck by the notion of schooling on a dial during a pandemic. As conditions improve, you dial up to more in-person instruction, but when they worsen, you may dial down again. And really this is the notion of the end of snow days. As schools as places that are not fully in-person, you might dial-down on a snow day and move the class to the virtual classroom, and then dial back up when the snow clears. In the pandemic school world, every class is both a physical space and a virtual space.
There is much more thinking to do on this, but maybe one of the unintended results of the pandemic is that we no longer need to turn school off and on – we think of where it occurs on a dial.
And sorry kids, it might mean no more snow days.
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