Tag: snow days

Uuuggghhhhhh

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

From the “First World Problems” department: another two-hour delay tomorrow, because of cold, apparently; I do not have time for thirty-minute class periods when my Algebra kids have a final on Wednesday. Can we wait until Thursday or Friday for further weather-related drama, please? Or even after that? Because once winter break hits I genuinely don’t feel any need at all to leave my house for two weeks.

Maybe I’ll just refuse to let my third hour in the room and tell everyone I’m keeping my Algebra kids for an extra class period. I’m sure that’ll fly.

I can’t believe I don’t know this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

To be clear, that’s not one of our buses, although we did have a day earlier this week where every single bus was at least ten minutes late to school. It’s gross outside right now– I had to make a quick run to Target that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and while the roads weren’t bad, the parking lot was a bloody nightmare and I’m moderately surprised I’m still alive.

I told a class earlier this week that we should have a regular week of school because I wasn’t aware of any bad weather in the near future, so naturally we got a “We are carefully monitoring the weather and will make an announcement about a delay or cancellation as soon as feasible” email tonight. I explicitly do not want a delay or a cancellation between now and next Wednesday; we have shit to do. Which probably makes a delay tomorrow inevitable, unfortunately.

Anyway, how is it possible that after 20-some-odd years as a teacher and a few longer than that “in education” I still don’t really have any idea how school districts decide whether or not to cancel or delay school? The message I got mentions “closely monitoring the weather, along with sidewalk conditions, side streets, and bus stop access,” which … okay, that makes sense, but how? By who? That decision’s gonna be made at 5:00 in the morning. What network is the superintendent (I assume? Transportation’s surely involved, but that’s not something that’s going to be delegated, is it?) tapping into at 4:30 AM to figure out if school needs to be delayed in time for people to actually have time to react to the decision?

I would be completely unsurprised to discover that the decision was just based on vibes, on some sleepy-ass Lord High Muckety-Muck waking up and padding out to his driveway and making a call based on that, and there’s also definitely some domino theory going on, at least around here– if more than two of the three or four biggest districts close, everybody’s going down in rapid succession.

I think I’ll ask my boss tomorrow for some more details. They sure as hell aren’t asking the teachers.

(Also, I’d like for districts to implement a formal policy on days like this, that if we get an email at 7:30 the night before that we’ll have a decision “as soon as possible,” that we are also officially notified by the crack of dawn if we are not changing the schedule. It keeps me from checking my phone eighteen thousand times in the morning as I’m deciding whether I should get dressed for work. If you know we aren’t cancelling, say that.)

Sure, I can do that

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

Spent the last half hour talking a high school sophomore off the ledge, which is what you expect to happen when you teach 8th grade. She’s in Algebra 2 right now, which technically I’m legally allowed to teach, and I can absolutely handle both the mathematics behind and the explanation of that second inequality up there, but she swears up and down they haven’t been working with quadratics at all. That’s the second question of the two she asked me about, and the first of the other pair of inequalities looks like this:

…which is a reasonably tricky PEMDAS problem (a parenthetical with an exponent and a multiplier on it is the stuff of 10,000-comment internet videos) even before you get to graphing quadratics by hand, which I’m capable of with intense concentration but may not be great about explaining very well at the moment. Both pairs of inequalities have a simple linear inequality and a quadrilateral, and long story short, I’m not convinced her teacher gave her the assignment that he meant to. On an e-learning day, no less? You serious, man?

This isn’t a kid who’s going to forget that they just spent a month on quadratics or something like that, by the way. She’s bright. And she took a picture of one of her assignments from last week, which was graphing absolute values. The leap in difficulty from graphing absolute values on a number line to graphing systems of inequalities where one inequality is linear and the other is a PEMDAS nightmare that turns into a quadratic is … stark. There’s gotta be something else going on here.

Anyway, we’ve got the day off tomorrow again, which was the right decision. It’s been 20 below or worse all day, and it’s supposed to warm up significantly tomorrow, but at 8:00 in the morning it’s still going to be 20 below, and even after a two-hour delay it’s still going to be fifteen below– the temperature isn’t going to be conducive to human life until after noon, and you don’t make kids walk to school in subzero wind chills, especially when a lot of them don’t have coats. We will not lose Thursday or Friday, as it will be regular Midwest January cold and not the kind that has you cursing God.

The kids will, of course, find a way to make Thursday and Friday feel like a long week.

POlar VORtex (clap, clap, clapclapclap)

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Taken through the window from the safety of my library, that is about nine inches of snow, with maybe a foot or fifteen inches at the foot of the driveway where the snowplows have created a berm. Since I took this I’ve been outside and cleared enough of the driveway for my wife’s car to get in and out and mine to get in and out with a little bit of creative turning, at which point the battery died on my snowblower (mental note: buy a second battery) and I also hit my allotted fifteen minutes of being allowed outside, because, oh, right, it’s thirty below fucking zero out there. 

The high today is supposed to be around 4:00, so I’ll go back out around then and finish the driveway off and clear out enough room for the mailbox to be reachable on Tuesday. I’d love to know what percent of schools nationwide are going to be out on Tuesday; I figure the chance that we’ll be in person on Tuesday to be nearly zero and 50/50 on Wednesday; it’s supposed to warm up a lot in the afternoon but it’s still supposed to be twenty below in the morning and, as I’ve said many times, it’s just not safe. So this will be either a three- or a two-day work week, since even though technically I have to provide instruction on both of those days it doesn’t really count if I’m not actually at work. 

Meanwhile, I’m off on a common wintertime mental tangent, that being fascination at how our bodies perceive cold. As I said, the windchill is thirty below right now, and the actual air temperature is seven below zero. This becomes extremely dangerous after fifteen to twenty minutes and can genuinely be fatal if you’re not prepared for it.

I was absolutely colder on Frozenween than I was just now. Now, there are some mitigating circumstances; while it’s not nearly as labor-intensive as shoveling, even snowblowing nine inches of snow is work, and I wasn’t just sitting in a chair waiting for children to hand candy to, but I also had my beast coat on for Frozenween and a space heater next to me and I still spent half an hour after getting inside cradling a chemical hand warmer like fucking Gollum with the Ring.

(If you are from somewhere where it doesn’t usually get cold, or if you generally suffer from cold hands, these things are fucking lifesavers. I rarely have need to use them as a born-and-bred Northman but you should make sure you have some on hand just in case. Honestly, I should throw a set in the car, now that I think about it.)

Anyway, the difference, of course, is that my body has done whatever the hell bodies do when they adjust to cold weather; the other fun example of this will be the first day in Spring when it’s 45 degrees outside and everyone acts like it’s the middle of summer and goes outside in shorts and t-shirts. But I will never stop finding this fascinating; it is objectively much colder than it was on Halloween and I know I have to go back out in it again in a couple of hours and it’s genuinely no problem at all. 

Bullshitoween 2019

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

While the weather wasn’t as brutal as Whatthefuckoween in 2014, tonight featured a lovely fucking bastard of a snow and rain mix, and only a small handful of Trick or Treaters; my son, who has been talking about Halloween ceaselessly for weeks, tapped out after about ten houses. I kept my usual vigil in the driveway; while we no longer have the dogs to lose their damn minds every time someone rings the doorbell my anxiety issues are still juuuuust strong enough that I’m not interested in hearing the damn thing at random intervals all night long and I’d rather just brave the cold and be outside.

Total former student count: three. Level of joy at seeing the look on a kid’s face when you utter the words “you can take the rest of it” to them at 6:57 PM: infinite.

Here’s the thing, though: the last time we had shitty weather on Halloween it just snowed and left an inch or so of accumulation on everything. Today it has been raining steadily all day, it is going to continue raining for another three hours or so … and it’s then going to immediately dip below freezing and the temperature is forecast to be twenty-seven degrees at 7:00 in the morning tomorrow.

In other words, all of that water is going to freeze. And it’s going to stay frozen overnight. And the city of South Bend does not have salt trucks ready on October 31 or November 1. They are the same trucks that are currently kitted out for picking up leaves, and they aren’t going to be able to flip them all over overnight for one day of spreading salt on roads coated in black ice.

I would call even odds on whether we have school tomorrow, is what I’m saying. Because as slippery as the roads are looking to be, with no salting, it very well may be too dangerous for the buses to run. And as someone who has been advocating formally moving Halloween to the last Friday or Saturday in October for years, it would not bother me one tiny little bit to lose the day after Halloween to an ice day.

Three more days

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

…well, five, actually. But I’m not going to work tomorrow and day five is a teacher work day. So three more days, with the kids, for me, specifically.

I can do this.

In which I almost die because I’m stupid but then I don’t so it’s okay

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

I have made a number of very bad driveway-related decisions in the last 48-72 hours, guys.

BAD DECISION THE FIRST: I did not get up at five this morning to clear the driveway before going to work. This ensured that a day and night’s worth of wet, heavy snow was on my driveway– the type of snow that doesn’t basically disintegrate back into fluffy snow when the snowblower tosses it, but limply splats back onto your driveway a few feet away, ensuring that you just have to move the same snow over and over again and that the job gets harder and harder the closer you get to being done.

BAD DECISION THE SECOND: I did not clear the driveway of the relatively small amount of snow that had fallen in previous days either– basically I should have hit the driveway at least twice instead of zero times in the last four or five days– which ensured that under the wet, heavy snow is now a layer of hard-packed, days-old, repeatedly driven-on ice, meaning that at least twice I got a split-second holy shit I’m about to break my leg and die out here scare while clearing the driveway. Now, neither time did I fall and break my leg, but another inch or so of sliding either way and something really shitty woulda happened.

BAD DECISION THE THIRD: I had on my beastcoat. Understand that I have two articles of cold-weather outerwear: a “winter coat” and a Winter Coat. I wear my “winter coat” most of the time and I rarely button it. I am Of the North and the cold generally does not bother me very much, but all of the talk of fifty below wind chills over the next couple of days has somewhat thrown me off of my game. My Winter Coat is rated to sixty below zero, and I need you to understand that in the most literal sense possible my Winter Coat possesses no chill whatsoever. It’s a Carhartt, for those of who who will understand that. And I need to be careful when I wear it, because most of the time it’s way too goddamn much coat for what I need. For example, if I’m going to wear it in the car I cannot have the heat on. I’ll be sweaty by the time I get out of the car, even on a short drive. Opening the windows is actually not a bad idea.

Wearing this motherfucker outside, with a sweater on underneath, on what isn’t really that cold of a day (yet) while performing strenuous work– another disadvantage of the ice is that the wheels on the snowblower don’t work at all and I’m basically just ceaselessly shoving it through 6-8″ of, again, heavy wet snow– meant that I realized halfway through the job that I was feeling kind of woozy because of, no shit, impending Goddamn heatstroke.

Yeah. My wife wasn’t home yet and my son was inside by himself doing who knows what, so if I break a leg and then die in the driveway I’mma stay leg-broke and dead in the driveway until she gets home, because it ain’t like he can move me, or that he’d even look up from the iPad long enough to notice my dead ass out there. So I went inside for a few minutes, let my heart rate slow down, took off the sweater and the beastcoat, and swapped my soaked-in-sweat knit winter hat for a regular baseball cap. And then made …

BAD DECISION THE FOURTH, which was going back outside before mopping my stupid, covered-in-sweat body off. Because what with all of the sweating and dying from roasting myself alive inside my fucking Beastcoat I’d forgotten that, while not much by historical standards, it was actually fucking cold outside, and that you really do not want to be outside on even moderately cold days if you are soaking fucking wet. And while I can’t be trusted to say whether the temperature had actually dropped while I was inside– it’s not like I was feeling the actual air temperature anyway– I can sure as hell state with certainty that the wind picked up pretty substantially while I was inside, meaning that any residual body heat I had left was gone, gone gone within minutes of getting back outside, and I still had half the damn driveway to do. Eventually I had to come back inside and put a third hat on, and the first thing I had to do when I finally came back inside for good was mop off my beard, which is super fun.

On the plus side, now that I’ve survived all this stupid bullshit, warmed up and cooled off and dried off, I’m going to go take a shower and then change into sweatpants and a sweater and I am not going outside under any circumstances for the next three days, whether work calls off or not. Chicken soup time, motherfuckers.

Another thing I just realized

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, WorkLeave a comment

5104389f26c12.image_.jpgMy kid’s school is cancelled tomorrow– not because of the weather, which is supposed to be absolutely outstanding, but because nearly 40% of the students in some grade levels and a not-inconsiderable number of teachers and subs have been sick lately.  The email from the principal named no less than four different diseases that had been running rampant in the building lately, and apparently the janitorial staff will be boiling the building tomorrow.

It’s probably good that this happened, because the email also made reference to the “four-day weekend” that the kids were about to have, which made both my wife and I realize that he actually does have Monday off, which neither of us had really realized because we don’t have any idea how the hell to check a school calendar.

So here’s the cool part: I started the Current Occupation in June, right?  And it’s mid-February now, as insane as that might feel.  During all that time I have not missed a single day of work due to illness.  I’ve come home and died a couple of times, and had some less-than-fantastic days, but I haven’t really been sick in months.  And that’s after fifteen years of missing, usually, around a day a month every single year I was teaching.  I was rarely if ever able to carry sick days across from one year to the next and had to dip into the sick bank twice.  And not one illness worth any serious consideration since June, despite constant contact with the public throughout that time.

Add that to the pile of reasons I don’t miss teaching, I guess.