Snow day! Oh, snow day. Um, snow day?

This last week, school was out Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, I had seven job interviews at a college interview day. Tuesday, we had in-service. Wednesday, the students were back to work with us, but this is what it looked like outside by lunchtime:

Like the palm tree? It's about 5 inches tall and inside on the windowsill.

And it didn't stop coming down for two days. Our area had over fourteen inches of snow fall. Suffice it to say, we had a snow day. Then another. Then a weekend. As I write this on Sunday, the weather experts are predicting another foot or more of snow tonight and tomorrow. So, a snow day tomorrow is a real possibility. When we Kansans were lamenting the lack of precipitation in our area for the last year, I don't think we were asking to get the backlog all at once!

As children, we saw a snow day as nothing more than an unexpected day off. Sledding! Hot cocoa! Movie marathons! And I will admit that as an adult, an unexpected day off is just as appealing. But, to teachers, snow days test our ability to adapt. Of course, every job requires adaptability and a snow day may require some people to work from home or to work extra hard when they get back in order to catch up. Some people may luck out and not really have to do much other than come back when the roads are clear. But for teachers, we have to take our plan, which we have packed full of meaningful, interesting, engaging learning tasks, and tweak it until it squeaks. We have to get all that learning into fewer days. For me, as a student teacher, my unit for my portfolio project for licensure will have to be shortened. My observation this week will perhaps not be the spectacular lesson I was planning, but something different and hopefully just as impressive. The students won't be ready for that spectacular lesson with two or three fewer classes ahead of it. I'm doubting that particular lesson is going to survive in the form I was planning. Bits of it may work themselves in here and there, but I won't have the luxury of an entire class period for that particular activity. We have a lot of reading to do, a lot of Shakespeare to decipher, interpret, and apply. So what will we do? We'll do what we've been practicing all along. We'll reflect, adjust, and we'll get to work.

Snow, oh snow, wherefore art thou so deep?