Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

By Bill Henk – If you’re wondering what would possess me to write about snow on an education blog, the answer is simple.  Why, SNOW DAYS, of course!

Yessir, the forecast for today calls for the first significant snowfall of the winter.   It’s been long in coming this year, which is fine by me, because I’m not a big fan of trying  to clear the white stuff in general let alone large amounts of it.

But I digress.  Let’s just agree that writing  about snow days is perfectly fitting for an education blog, particularly on the advent of a major winter stormfront.  So here goes.

Why So Happy?

Back in elementary, middle and senior high school, absolutely nothing felt more welcome, exciting, and enjoyable to me than a day off from school made possible by a snowstorm.  And for the record, blizzards were even better because:  (1) then there was no chance of school being held and (2) there was instead a good chance that it would be cancelled for two or more days.

For school-aged kids, then and now, every major snowfall carries the glorious  prospect of a snow day, and the rare opportunity to just goof off endlessly at home instead.   I don’t know how kids today would spend the time, maybe at the mall, but personally, I loved to devote these mornings and early afternoons to the great outdoors — sledding, snowball fighting, making snowmen and snow angels, watching the plows, and doing anything else my buddies and I could concoct that somehow involved snow and fun.  These precious days were regular snowapaloozas.

Afterwards, we’d go indoors to thaw, and we’d watch hours of TV on end, mostly game shows like The Price is Right, Let’s Make a Deal, the Match Game, Password, and eons ago, even Queen For a Day.  Talk shows like Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin would get a look and even soap operas.  My mother would make hot chocolate, tomato or chicken noodle soup, and grilled cheese sandwiches – pretty much anything consumable that would warm us up.  I thought of the entire experience  as Heaven in the real world.

How Awesome are Snow Days?

Snow days might only rank as #921 on the current List of 1000 Awesome Things, but they stood at or very near the top of my list, that’s for sure.  By the way,  the “Awesome List” distinguishes in zeal between the low impact pre-planned snow day (when there’s so much existing snow that school must be cancelled), the zippier, fully expected snow day predicted by the weather forecast, and the ultimate surprise snow day when you didn’t see the gift of a free day coming.  You just wake up in the morning, behold the blanket of snow covering the earth, and hear your parents tell you that school has been cancelled.  Oh, the joy.  Put differently, the more unexpected the snow day, the better.

However, trust me when I tell you that any of the three types would have been just dandy by me.  I’d take ‘em all.  As long as school wouldn’t be in session, I was a happy little snowman.

This reaction will not come as a surprise to our longtime readers who know from one of my earliest posts about my hate affair with school, mostly the latter.   The short version is that it just wasn’t my favorite place — a great irony given how much time I’d spend in them later as a teacher and even as a professor.

The Snowy Day

Truth be told,  I looked forward to snow days every bit as much as a teacher.  By then, I no longer hated school.  In fact, I liked it a lot.  But  I thoroughly welcomed the break from the grind that the occasional snow day provided.

I distinctly remember one magnificent snow day in my early years as a teacher.  Our school district was located smack dab in the middle of Pennsylvania’s  snow belt.  Thanks to lake effect snow in the northwest (courtesy of Lake Erie), we were regularly dumped on in HUGE almost unbelievable quantities.

But here’s the thing.  I and some other teacher friends who worked in the district lived 30 miles to the west of my school, so our carpool drove through four other school districts to get to ours.  We often did so by driving between snow walls reaching as high as 10 feet on both sides of the road.  At some point each year, even industrial snow plows became useless; the snow had to be cleared with massive highway frontloaders.  I often thought that from the air the road must have looked like an Olympic bobsledding track.

Unfortunately, our school superintendent refused to call a snow day even when all the districts my fellow carpoolers and I had to cross did.  I think it was some kind of weird badge of honor for him.  Either that or he was nuts, a viable hypothesis seeing as how he gave the exact same half hour welcome back speech, word for word mind you, on the first day of school every year I worked there.  We were pretty sure that he didn’t remember giving the same remarks the year before and before and before.

Anyway, late one afternoon the region got hit with something on the order of the snowstorm of the century.   A small bunch of us commuting teachers gathered that evening to watch television after spending several hours just getting the snow off our designated cars and clearing a path through the parking lot of our apartment complex.  You see, we needed to be ready to head to school in the morning, because even though every other school district in the tri-state area would cancel, we’d have to brave the elements to put in a regular day of work — even if the kids couldn’t get there because the buses couldn’t negotiate the drifts.

Then suddenly without warning, programming was interrupted with school cancellations, and by a veritable miracle, it was announced that our school district would be closed, too.  At first a deafening hush fell over the room, and then all at once the place erupted.

We cheered and hooted and hollered.  It was a woo-hoo moment, and I am not kidding when I tell you that I literally did cartwheels across the apartment.  It was as if we had won the lottery or the Super Bowl.  (For the purposes of imagery, think of the scene in Ace Ventura when Ace leaves the monastery and his exit engenders an insane celebration).

The bottom line is that we were unbelievably relieved to be able to just take a day to regroup without the pressure of slipping and sliding our way to school for 30 grueling miles driving directly into the sun.  We could actually take a breath and relax.

At the time it crossed my mind that students probably had no idea how much their teachers looked forward to a snow day, too.

Thinking back to my childhood and adolescence and taking it right up to the present, some things never change.  I might not do cartwheels when Marquette cancels classes, and as an educator I probably shouldn’t admit this, but the gift of a day to spend at home (as long as it’s not all devoted to shoveling and blowing snow), is one I still very much treasure.

So, although today’s storm might not result in a snow day, I guarantee you that there are plenty of school kids out there wishing, hoping, and praying.

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Note to Readers:  I want to thank my wife, Lisa, for giving me the idea to write this post.  When I got back from the Marquette/St. Johns game I had exactly nothing I could write about and still meet my morning deadline.  The snow day angle enabled me to dredge up memories that I hope led to worthwhile reading.