Opinion

Don’t say no to snow

Rae Weinstein, opinion editor|January 15, 2022

Freshman Lea Weinstein plays in the snow with her dad on a snow day while sister junior Rae Weinstein stays inside to do homework.

It’s the night before school, you check the forecast, it calls for snow. You try every trick in the book to make sure school is cancelled: you wear your pajamas inside out, put a spoon in the freezer and flush an ice cube down the toilet. When you wake up the next morning, you check your phone for that glorious notification. Sure enough, it is there, no school. But you see something else too. Five notifications from Canvas: your teachers are posting assignments for you to do during the day, and just like that, the snow day is ruined.

COVID-19 has increased our dependence on technology for school allowing us to even take classes at home. After a year of fully virtual school, teachers have gotten comfortable with posting assignments online. Now that it is winter, and we are back in school, students are worried that snow days will cease to exist and teachers will opt for assignments done at home.

I have personally experienced this. On Jan. 7, the third snow day of the week, one of my teachers posted an assignment to be done and turned in when we got back to school. When I saw the assignment, my heart sank. Leave it up to Covid-19 to ruin yet another thing.

Even though teachers have the capability to do this, I don’t believe they should. The argument to go remote on days where the weather doesn’t permit people to go to school is that with remote learning the students won’t fall behind. But have they ever before? School systems already have days built into the year for snow days, and can always add days at the end of the school year to replace the ones lost if necessary. Snow days have been around forever; adults who grew up with snow days learned just fine, so there isn’t a need to change it.

It is not just the teachers though, it is up to the county on whether or not we will have remote learning on snow days. The problem with this isn’t just kids losing their fun, but if we were to go back to being able to have remote learning, the county would have to supply people who need it with WiFi, which is an arduous process.

Getting rid of snow days would also be inconvenient for parents of young kids. Most parents still have to work on snow days, but if their kids are doing work, a large part of helping the kid falls on them.

We all love snow days, including teachers. It’s a day they can spend with their kids, catching up on things they need to do or just taking a break, not to mention the nostalgia and the excitement of school being cancelled. Let present and future students experience this joy too.

We may have the technology for remote learning, but is it actually needed except in extreme cases like a pandemic? A couple of unplanned days off won’t do any harm in the long run. Snow days give everyone a pause, a mental health day. Yes, of course, that’s what the weekend is for, but students spend a large part of the weekend doing homework. Snow days are like a break, a blip in the week when it feels like nothing exists but snow, hot cocoa and pajamas.

Snow days are like a gift, waking up to realize I can go back to sleep, looking outside to see the world covered in a blanket of white. We’ve all experienced this and we should all be able to continue to experience the joys of snow days while we still can.