Snow Day

I've been a teacher for almost 8 years now. First I was an Instructor at a small southern college, and then I was promoted to Asst. Professor. In 2000 I left the south to come back home to New England and have been a teacher at a prep school in Massachusetts ever since. One of the great things about growing up in New England is the snow days and I'll tell you it doesn't change when you grow up and become a teacher. There's a snowstorm working its way toward central Mass as we speak, it is supposed to drop about 4-6" around here. That in and of itself would not necessarily be enough to cancel school tomorrow. When I was a kid I thought it was all about the amount of snow that fell, but now as an adult I understand it also timing and type of precipitation. If you get 6" of snow that falls between 4pm and 4 am then next morning there is actually a decent shot that the plows will have enough time to clear the roads for the morning commute, especially if it's a light fluffy snow.

Tomorrow looks good for us. The snow started right after school began this morning and we got a nice appetizer of about 2" of wet heavy snow (the instant snowball kind, and you better believe they were flying today). That snowfall has since stopped, temps have dropped and there is a very fine glaze of ice on the roads. Soon another batch of snow should start and last through the morning commute. Midday it's slated to change over to freezing rain, in fact we're expecting as much as a 1/2" of ice. I love the way that stuff looks when it coats the leafless trees...if I can figure out how to upload pics I'll haul out my camera and get some shots of it for anyone who might be reading this from a warmer climate.

So, as I said our chances of a cancellation are good. It's funny, as a kid it seemed like we were the only ones that cared about the snow days, but I can tell you from personal experience that is not the case. Certainly snow days can get in the way of academic progress, just prior to winter break we had to cancel school during finals and that meant a bunch of international students have to make up an exam this week. But around the lunch table all the talk today was about the potential for no school tomorrow. I can almost guarantee we'll be closed. The Headmaster of the school absolutely loves to pull the trigger on these things. Sometimes he has a tendency to jump the gun a bit. I am a dorm parent (hey you can't beat free rent) for 30 teenage boys. During my first year the Headmaster made the mistake of canceling school at about midnight. Now the boys in the dorm are supposed to be asleep in their rooms by 11pm, but how often did you follow the rules when you were 16?? So a couple of kids get wind of the situation over the email system and BAM, the dorm is a madhouse. Me and the other two dorm parents struggled for close to 30minutes to get the guys settled down after that. The Headmaster must have gotten wind of what happened, because he's never canceled prior to 5:30am since then.


Working in a boarding program adds a slightly different twist to the day of course. I'll have some sort of responsibility tomorrow, either opening the student center for kids to hang out, play pool and video games etc., or maybe opening the gym for the kids to play basketball or showing a movie in the theatre (almost always something lame, last year they actually showed "Snowday"). It's actually kind of fun. My first year here we had 6 snow days, and 3 of those were consecutive (huge storm) and during one of those days we did a snow sculpture contest. In a way it kind of reminds me of being a kid when my mom was able to stay home with us on snow days. We'd crank up the fireplace after my brother and I shoveled to driveway (a dirt driveway, ugh) and mom would make us hot chocolate. We'd play cards, monopoly, Life, Backgammon or do puzzles all day. This was in the days prior to VCR's, and daytime was horrible, so we had to come up with other things to do. Of course you could go outside and build snowmen or have massive snowball fights too.

One year (I must have been 6 and my brother 9) when we lived in Warner, our babysitter's neighbor built a toboggan run. They shaped this massive curved wall of snow and brought out the garden hose to ice it down...bad news...where were the winter Olympics in '76? Warner, NH baby! Seriously, we had those blue plastic roll up sleds and those round metal discs. If all else failed you could wax down a piece of cardboard. It really didn't seem to matter, outside of spiked boots everything flew down that run. They created a really high banked wall as the run made a curve at the end, we soon discovered that if you hit that bank in just the right way you would fly up into the air and come crashing to rest in a nearby snow bank. We all thought that was very cool of course.

That all came to an end one afternoon. My brother got a big running start; he hit the ice already with a full head of steam. As he flew shrieking down the sheet of ice behind the Manning's house on School street it all went wrong, when he went up the banking instead of going out he went straight up, and as they say what goes up must come down...hard. The Doctor in the ER said the tightly knotted green rubber boots my brother was wearing likely kept the bone from piercing the skin. He was in a cast for the rest of the winter and into the spring. We lived maybe a half mile from school and had always walked, but that winter my brother rode the bus. He also lost a couple of Bic pens down his cast trying to scratch an itch, but it healed fine and in time for summer, so he didn't miss any prime swimming time.

I must apologize for the rambling nature of my posts, I was never good at tightly structured papers in school unless I did multiple revisions, thankfully I don't teach English, but that's about what you're going to get from me, so get used to it. Later.