Snow!

Most of the teachers I know have a love/hate relationship with snow. We are just as excited as the kids to get a day off of school, but then we have to readjust our plans to account for the missed day(s). And don't even get me started on late starts. No one wants a late start - either a full day of school or a full day off, please. Except when it's icy and dangerous on the roads at 7:00am and bare and wet at 9:00am it doesn't exactly make sense to take the full day off. But making that prediction gets messy. At least the final decisions are above my pay grade.

It started to snow on Tuesday morning just as school was starting. It wasn't sticking to anything and did not for the duration of the school day, but I still had an eighth grader picked up during first period due to the snow. It snowed one me on my way home, but wasn't sticking to the roads or sidewalk, just the foliage. But as the temperature dropped, we got a few inches of snow. It sort of melted and compacted again before daybreak in my yard so I couldn't get an accurate measurement.

Wednesday was a snow day. 

Thursday, we had a late start. Even so, one of my coworkers fell on the ice in the parking lot on her way into the building.

On Friday, the district where my school resides called a late start, but my school did not. It snowed on me for most of my drive in. When I hit the county line, it stopped but by the time I got to my school's parking lot it had started to snow again. At least two more staff members (including me) fell in the parking lot trying to get into the building. It started to snow about 7:45am and literally looked like a snow globe when I looked out the classroom windows for a time between 8:00-8:15. As kids were arriving at my school, the surrounding district called a snow day. Most of the day was clear, but we did have indoor recesses for the second day in a row.

Friday night it began to snow again, fairly late. Before midnight it started sticking. This is when my husband and I were on our way home from a holiday party. My husband tried three routes into our neighborhood, sliding back down the first two hills. I kept telling him to park in the Safeway parking lot and we'd walk the two or three miles home from there. But he tried the third route, that took us past the aforementioned Safeway. This route was his last choice because it has the steepest hill, but it also has a downhill before the uphill to gain momentum. We know from previous experience it works well, as long as you don't stop at the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. We made it home and woke up to a winter wonderland on Saturday morning.

I just learned how to drive a stick shift in the past few months, and after our 20-year old's car died, our fun sporty stick shift car has become my primary mode of transportation. So far, I've been able to get to and from where I've needed and wanted to be. On Sunday a few of my coworkers and I had reservations for high tea at a shop owned by one of our school families. I scoped out a parking space in the lot as I was in the turn lane to enter. It looked like there were many spaces at the top of the hill, so I put the car in gear and gave myself the momentum on the flat part of the road to get myself up the hill. It would have worked too, but a car pulled out in front of me and I had to stop on my way up the hill. I could not move forward, so I put it in reverse and backed down the hill into another section of the parking lot. There were spaces over there too, but none that I could get into easily given I was driving backwards. I was on flat ground again and the car that had made me stop had exited the lot, so I decided to try for up the hill again. With no reason to stop on my way up, I made it! And I did not stall the car. I felt like an accomplished stick shift in the snow driver!

On a totally separate note, I had a fun/funny "teachable moment" interaction with a student this week. We were working on a worksheet from our social emotional curriculum created by Committee for Children. He was asking questions bordering on the argumentative about the questions the worksheet was asking. I looked at him and said, "It sounds like you'd rather argue about the questions than reflect a little more deeply to answer them." He was silent for a beat. "Yeah, that's probably true," he said before turning his focus back to the worksheet.