Bring Back Real Snow Days!
Remote learning has ruined one of childhood's most coveted experiences.
Hello, Analog Family readers!
Some of you have wondered where my posts are. I apologize for the slower rate of publication. As mentioned in an earlier newsletter, I’m in the final stages of finishing a book manuscript, which is an all-consuming task. I have realized, unfortunately, that there is a hard limit to the number of words my brain can string together comprehensively over the course of a day. Right now, all of that creativity is going toward the book and not to this newsletter, which feels frustrating, because writing for The Analog Family is one of my favourite things to do.
I have also been doing a lot of public speaking (please check out my updated speaker website). In the past month, I’ve given talks in Winnipeg, Central Valley and Poughkeepsie, New York, and Holland, Michigan; in fact, I am writing this from a hotel room near Seattle, with talks in Coupeville and Anacortes this week. In early March, I’ll be in Boston for a professional development workshop. It’s a busy and demanding schedule, but honestly, it feels like the greatest job in the world. It’s deeply gratifying to connect with parents and educators who care enough about managing kids’ screen time that they’re willing to hire me to come talk and start an important conversation about what we can all do to fix it.
So, while it pains me that The Analog Family has suffered neglect lately, I assure you that it remains alive and well and that I am full of ideas for things I plan to write about as soon as the manuscript is (more or less) done. I appreciate your ongoing support and willingness to stick with me. The life of a professional writer is an inherently unstable one, which this Substack newsletter helps somewhat to offset, so thank you!
And now, a brief harangue on the contentious topic of snow days…
A Slippery Slope
I live in a small town on the edge of Lake Huron, in rural Ontario, Canada. We get lake-effect snow, which comes whipping off the water and blows sideways, causing whiteouts so dense that I can’t see the other side of the street from my window. A friend recently informed me that the Great Lakes are the most consistently windy region of the world, so you can imagine how bad things can get when high winds mix with heavy snow. Often the highways are blocked off with police barricades due to zero visibility, and if you drive on them, your car insurance is void.
On days like that, it makes perfect sense for school buses to be cancelled and, in some extreme situations, for the schools themselves to close. Those two things are decided separately. When buses are cancelled, schools remain open for students to attend (either by walking or getting dropped off), though classes are altered if there are few students present. The schools close only if the weather is truly terrible, and then all kids stay home. Either way, both are referred to as a “snow day”, implying that it’s not business as usual.
Something odd has happened in recent years, though. Ever since Covid, when the Ontario government shut down schools for a total of 135 days (27 weeks), longer than any other province in Canada, and kids were forced to do remote learning, the rules changed and have not gone back to how they were before. First, the high schools no longer stay open if buses are cancelled; in my town, that includes kids in grades 7 and 8, who attend the local senior school. This means that walking to school is not even an option; everything is online.
Second, the number of snow days that the kids get now is astronomical. So far, my kids have had at least 20 snow days since December (today is yet another one)! Last year, they had 27 snow days, which is more than 5 weeks out of class. While I continue to send my youngest child to elementary school every day, even when buses are cancelled, I am frustrated that there’s no option for high schoolers to do that.
We did not get this many snow days in the past. What’s changed? I don’t blame the weather, I blame tech.
Because We Can, We Do
As soon as a system was put in place to facilitate remote learning, it became much easier for schools and bus companies to cancel in-person education on a whim, and now they do it at the slightest threat of bad weather. To add insult to injury, many of the snow days we’ve had have ended up being perfectly fine days, with no effect whatsoever on anyone else’s ability to drive or move around. But because a tech-based alternative now exists, the powers-that-be don’t hesitate to cite an “abundance of caution” and throw a wrench into everyone’s routine.
This is disastrous for a number of reasons.
Online learning is inferior to in-person learning. We do our children a disservice when we keep insisting that it’s a reasonable substitute. I’m not convinced that a virtual class is a better use of kids’ time than telling them to read a book or memorize a poem or make a meal from scratch or exercise or make art or go outside to play for an hour. Surely, the plummeting test scores that we witnessed during and after Covid are evidence that kids do far better in class than out of it.
A report by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute last year said that digital tools impair rather than enhance learning and that EdTech has been a “failed experiment.” The country has boldly reversed its tech policies in class and invested in books, pens, and paper. The UN has called for moderation in using tech in the classroom, warning against harmful rampant overuse. The OECD found that EdTech has “not delivered the academic benefits once promised,” and that “students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”
When we deprive kids of 5+ weeks of in-class time every year, that can’t help but have a serious impact on their education. I overhear my teens’ online classes, and they are a joke, consisting mainly of tired teachers assigning busywork to distracted kids, all of whom have their cameras off because they’re busy doing other things—and why wouldn’t they? When using a laptop for schoolwork, a student spends 38 minutes of every hour off-task, and most students doing homework on a computer cannot last more than 6 minutes before looking at other, more distracting (and enjoyable) content.
Furthermore, school is no longer a reliable presence in kids’ lives. This is disorienting. When you consider that my sons have spent more than 4 whole weeks out of class this winter alone, that means that they wake up every morning, wondering if they have to go to school or not. It’s no longer a given. They check websites with names like Snow Day Predictor and hound me for updates in the early hours, asking if I’ve received a text yet, saying buses are canceled. It annoys me, but much of the time, they’re right to inquire! It feels like we can’t rely on school being there anymore. It’s hard to make plans, not knowing if I might have to be home to feed and supervise them.
Perhaps worst of all, the poor kids never get a real snow day anymore. They don’t know what it’s like to have no school at all—to sleep in, to go outside to play in the fresh snow, to spend a carefree day doing whatever they want. We all need days like that to rest and recharge, but now the kids never get a break. I remember the sheer joy that a snow day announcement elicited in me and my sister; it felt like a rare gift from heaven, the gods smiling up on us and liberating us from the drudgery of school. I can only imagine how awful it must be for the kids to hear “snow day”, and then spend the whole day hunched over a laptop, listening to teachers drone relentlessly on Microsoft Teams for 6 hours.
That’s why I was so delighted to hear that New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a true snow day this week, when the city was hit with a major snowstorm on Sunday night. He decreed that no remote classes would be held on Monday, “just a full classic snow day.” The city schools’ chancellor said, “We do not believe providing remote instruction tomorrow would be effective.” (The last official snow day was in March 2019.) The New York Times ran a piece with heartwarming pictures of kids sledding, building snowmen, and frolicking in the storm’s aftermath, which is exactly what kids should be doing.
What Can We Do?
I wish my school board would take a page out of NYC’s book and recognize the benefits of liberating kids from their computers and encouraging free outdoor play, at least occasionally. I also wish we could stop catastrophizing the weather and assuming that every inclement forecast is a kind of Armageddon; instead, we should trust our abilities to cope and be smart about it. Snow is not a radical new concept. Many of us grew up dealing with it.
I wish education could once again be viewed as a nonnegotiable priority for kids’ lives, not something that is easily discarded or brushed off at the slightest threat of precipitation. I wish administrators would acknowledge that having a consistent routine matters enormously to kids’ well-being, maybe even more than pursuing an agenda of maximum safety at all costs. Decision-makers might benefit from taking the advice offered by the Canadian Pediatric Society: “Keep kids as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”
Finally, I wish that more people recognized that just because we have the technology to do something does not always mean that we should use it. Remote learning is an impressive feat, but that does not automatically make it good for our kids. A new technology should have to prove its utility (and its harmlessness) before we adopt it widely and impose it on the most vulnerable members of our society.
I don’t have a solution. I’m as frustrated as many other parents are. Part of me wants to revolt against remote learning on principle and dismiss my kids from their online classes, but they’re older now, and they’re doing advanced math and physics and chemistry, and those subjects require daily attention. I suppose they could ask their teachers for physical handouts the day before a cancellation is predicted, but I recognize that’s added work for the teachers. So, I’m not sure how to proceed, but I do know that this teeter-totter between in-class and remote learning is causing more harm than good. Surely, we can do better. Anyone have some good ideas?
You Might Also Like:
In the News:
My latest piece for the Globe and Mail newspaper is about family dinners: “Eating a meal with your kids is more important than you think”
And if you missed last month’s column, it’s worth a read: “Yes, teenagers need playgrounds, too”
That is wild that your School Board runs things that way. Here I thought the rural areas were better on attitudes to tech than here in Toronto.
We have only real snow days, if the buses are cancelled people are still encouraged to walk, and there’s no remote learning.
(Though, last week when the buses were cancelled so my daughter was home but school was still on, she actually voluntarily logged on at the time when she knows they have time to work on their slide projects with their partners … to be fair it’s making a Choose Your Own Adventure on Google Slides so it’s fun, but I did feel a bit weird that workaholism seems to start at a young age when tech is in the picture. It is like the way I voluntarily do more work at 10 pm because I enjoy my job and am intrigued by the work, but if it were 1986 and my work were at the office and I didn’t have it at home, I’d read a book because logging on and working isn’t an option.)
Hey, I live near Anacortes. Is it a public event?