Education and the blizzard scam

It’s wintertime. In the winter, it snows and gets cold. This has been happening for a while. I even remember it growing up in New Jersey. What I don’t remember is winter storms having names. That’s because The Weather Channel didn’t start naming them until 2012.

Here in Vermont, the colder side of zero is nothing new. According to my coffee shop associates and my own experience, 20 below has always been commonplace, and 40 below a feature of many winters.

Somehow, though, we managed to shovel and plow our way through winter storms without turning them into celebrities with names.

We also managed to survive at school. If it snowed too much, we canceled school that day, a feat we accomplished without automated snow day robocall systems.

Some schools made up for missing classes by building extra days into their calendars, and others added days at the end of the year when they needed to.

Now, owing to the suddenly “widespread wintry weather,” a phenomenon that shouldn’t entirely shock us, given that it is, after all, winter, schools are “losing precious instructional time to snow days.”

These occasional lost instructional hours are, of course, only a fraction of the many more hours lost daily to routine classroom disruption, counseling, dentistry, anti-bullying, anti-obesity and social skills programs, and all the other “whole-child,” nonacademic activities that don’t concern the experts alarmed by the weather, and that are, in fact, typically endorsed by those experts.

Other reasons besides the weather itself account for the increase in snow days. First, while everyone’s heard the legends about stalwart Grandpa hiking to school uphill both ways through a blizzard, I did walk a mile and a half round trip to first grade every day. We have gotten softer even since my 1950s suburban childhood.

Second, while my parents ably and more than amply protected me, they didn’t hover as close as parents do today.

Third, owing substantially to school consolidation, students increasingly travel farther from home via school buses.

Fourth, lawsuits have become America’s national pastime.

Some districts are opting to make up snow days by “adding minutes to school days already scheduled.” Others continue to favor shortening scheduled vacations or tacking on days in June.

They argue that adding whole days, rather than scattered minutes, better enables teachers to “complete their full lesson plans with integrity,” although you can’t necessarily count on students to show up on those additional days.

Student participation similarly complicates “virtual school days.” On these snow-triggered “e-learning days,” students remain home, where they’re “expected to complete their assignments online and communicate with teachers throughout the day.” Advocates claim that virtual days “avoid the disruption” to “educational momentum” and “minimize the loss of instructional time.”

You may be unclear as to how replacing a day of instruction with what amounts to online homework in any way minimizes lost instructional time. You may also be skeptical as to whether students who commonly refrain from focusing on lessons and communicating with teachers about what they’re supposed to be learning when they’re in the same room together would be likely to focus on lessons and communicate with those same teachers from home.

Advocates counter that “cyber-days,” aka “alternative learning days,” provide “meaningful instruction.” Some concede that they don’t “substitute for being with a teacher,” but true enthusiasts contend that since students spend so much class time on computers anyway, “the only difference” on snow days “is they’re doing it at home instead of at school.”

If that’s true, it casts a troubling, unflattering light on 21st century experts’ instructional visions and blueprints that increasingly equate education with parking students in front of laptops.

Not surprisingly, plans involving school-supplied laptops for every student are extremely popular with people who make their living manufacturing and selling laptops.

Since many students don’t have suitable home internet access, participating districts as far south as the Carolinas issue each student a canvas sack containing assignments prepared before the winter by their classroom teachers. Since these blizzard assignments are designed for use at any time, they aren’t tied to topics currently under discussion in class.

Formerly known as “busy work,” these oncescorned tasks have been redesignated “21st-century learning skills,” owing to the fact that they’re also posted on the school’s website for anyone who inadvertently left his bag at school. It’s also consistent with the prevailing assumption that tacking “21st century learning” onto any pointless task or dubious initiative automatically renders it worthwhile.

While online systems inevitably necessitate reteaching the snow day material for students who didn’t understand it, didn’t attempt it, or don’t have the internet, the lower tech bag system offers teachers the choice of losing another day’s “momentum” going over the “blizzard” work, thereby further interrupting what they were teaching before it snowed, or ignoring the work students were supposed to complete at home, thereby making an appropriate mockery of the entire enterprise.

As always, education officials haven’t missed a trick. Boosters in one district suggest that phys ed teachers, for instance, specifically assign “kids to do jumping jacks or build a snow fort.”

I’m all for snow forts. I just never thought they were why we have schools. Now, at least, though, we know what “meaningful instruction” means. And just in time, too. There’s another storm waiting for a name.

Other reasons besides the weather itself account for the increase in snow days. First, while everyone’s heard the legends about stalwart Grandpa hiking to school uphill both ways through a blizzard, I did walk a mile and a half round trip to first grade every day. We have gotten softer even since my 1950s suburban childhood.