Right now it’s snowing heavily outside my living room windows, and I’m grading papers while wearing a heavy sweater and extra pairs (pairs, not just an extra pair) of socks. Winter, not to put too fine a point on it, has arrived.
Last winter, my school has something like eleven snow days and five or six early dismissals or late arrivals. This early sign of a bad winter — snow before Halloween, and quite a lot of it — suggests that I should be thinking how to deliver teachingg, learning, and training without necessarily having kids in class to do it.
That means returning to my video presentations, or developing more slideshows on slideshare.net, and designing more lessons to be delivered by other means an face-to-face. If today’s snowstorm turns out to be an indicator, we might well lose three weeks of school to winter weather, and not just two.
But at that point, one has to ask — should we be rethinking the school calendar anyway? If our school year is going to be this heavily disrupted, maybe we should just plan to take part of January and February off, and load up weeks somewhere else.
Thisis just me speculating out loud — my school isn’t thinking about making changes to accommodate Momma Nature’s renewed ill humor, and neither is yours. After how many years of disruptive weather, though, should a revision of e school calendar be on the agenda?
