I’m not sure how I feel about the “snow day lesson” policy we’ve taken up lately. Something about it seems unnatural and cancerous. Sure, I get that many courses have a set curriculum they need to cover, and that snow days make it harder to do so. But I’m not entirely clear whether the snow day lesson is meant to keep a course on track by setting up a way to cover the material that would have been covered in class or is meant to make the day outside of school feel less like a—gasp!—waste of time.

I confess that for the most recent snow day I asked students to stay on track with the assignment sheet rather than pushing everything back a day.   And I asked my seniors to make the extra effort of posting their reading journal entries on the discussion forum of LMS and then respond to one entry. I feel a bit guilty about doing that. Shouldn’t snow days be sacred? What right have we teachers to interfere with divine disruptions of the daily grind? The heavens have ordained an opportunity to shift from “must” to “prefer.” So should it be. I’ve heard Marxist historians point out nostalgically that in medieval France, almost every week included a saint’s day or some other holiday in which the peasants stopped working and danced. Has our technology brought us little more than a way for work to intrude on the free time that technology is said to have made possible?

Alright, I doubt that French peasants had a better life than we do. Religious wars, plagues, bad harvests, and lice: I think I’ll stay with stress and existential ennui, as long as I’ve got antibiotics at the pharmacy and 2048 on my phone.

But maybe that’s the thing. Maybe it’s not that snow day lessons rob us of fun-portunities. Maybe it’s that snow day lessons fill what’s suddenly become empty; they smother novelty while it’s still in its crib. And in the same way that my devices fill my field of view with the screen in front of me, snow day lessons fill up the not-school time with more school. They replace change and possibility with same. I believe in what we do at Masters, but it shouldn’t crowd out everything else. By the same token, neither should the ever-present screen. How about this: I won’t assign snow day lessons if we all do something we haven’t done in the last month. Whether we sleep in for a change or frolic in snowfields lit by the full moon, let’s quiet all our routines in the fresh white hush.