By: Adi Dreml-Scully
Schools we’re supposed to be back to in-person learning today after the winter break. But mother nature had other plans making today the first snow day of 2022.
School districts all over Ontario were closed today due to the significant amount of snow containing up to as much as 40cm. This includes districts such as Toronto, York Region, Halton Region, Peel Region, Durham Region, and other parts of Ontario like Kawartha Pine Ridge, Waterloo Region, Trillium Lakelands, Simcoe County, and CSC MonAvenir.
This snow day has a lot of different effects on the teachers and students. Grade 10 CCSS student Zack Radford expressed his feelings he had about this snow day saying “ I didn’t find out I wasn’t going to be in school today until 5:40 am when they said buses were canceled, and then another call at 7:30 am announcing school was going to be completely closed.” Zack also expressed he was happy for this snow day because although he was excited to go back to school to see his friends, he was “worried about the new Covid-19 variants and would prefer to stay online.”
Teachers were not happy about the announcement of the snow day as they were all ready to go back to school and had all of their lessons planned for the students. Many teachers were even going on social media and expressing their thoughts about the call for a snow day. Grade 2-3 split elementary school teacher Meghan Summaria who is in the Dufferin Peel Catholic school board expressed her frustration because she was asked to prepare for both synchronous and asynchronous models with very little time which was challenging, and then said “the messaging wasn’t very clear, we initially said we were going to be instructing with live synchronous learning, and that’s what I and all the teachers planned for, then we were told this morning at 8:00 am to switch to asynchronous.” Meghan did not have to teach a class today but was available all day for the students for any questions or concerns that may have come in. Meghan uses google classroom for everything. The work for the day was already uploaded to google slides for the students, so whether it was synchronous or asynchronous, she was ready to go. There were some concepts Meghan was ready to introduce today to the students that were “brand new”. But knowing she wasn’t able to provide live instruction, she had to scrap those plans and provide an alternative lesson plan at the last moment. For example, today was Martin Luther King Day, and she wasn’t able to answer any questions that the students may have had in that lesson. Meghan also had to say “ It’s just about being flexible, and your expectations have to be much lower than they once were “ because a lot of students nowadays are self-directed learners with no support at home. And got to be “crystal clear what your expectations are as the teacher.” However a lot of parents are sending positive feedback and appreciate the snow day fun implemented to the schedule for today and making it a little light-hearted.
Despite the challenges of the snow day today, It was the best call for the safety of all students and staff members across Ontario.
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