Two-Hour Delays

When morning temperatures are below zero, it doesn't take much wind before I get the text message stating that we are on a two-hour delay. Now what?

Some will go back to bed, some will get up and get moving. I'm a get-up and get moving kind of guy, but I have to have a plan. If I don't jot down a plan for my extra time, I will waste it.

I don't work well from home because I get distracted by other things, and I don't want to go to my classroom yet, so I have been visiting a local coffee shop and bringing my computer. I place that last sentence in the plural because we had three two-hour delays last week. 

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Contrast Coffee provided me with great tasting coffee, calm music, and a relaxing place where I can flip the lid on my laptop and catch up on things that have been on my to-do list. I never understood "going to the coffee shop" to work until I did it myself. I have been missing out!

Starting school two hours late provides a host of issues that need to be hammered out. Lunch count, attendance, normal morning routines are all jazzed up. Usually not a huge issue in the middle school environment, but with shared staff and 8th graders that move between the middle school and high school for band, art, etc. it can cause some friction.

The biggest issue I face is now I have two classes in the afternoon that will be run "as normal" and two classes that I won't see at all, and one class that gets caught up in the morning routine of lunch count, announcements, etc. 

That's the lesson management issue.

Again, if it's one day, no issue. When mother nature refuses to turn up the thermostat and we end up with three in one week, then it becomes something we need to work through.

Do you keep going through the content and have the afternoon classes get almost a week ahead of the morning classes? Do you do some SEL things in the afternoon to keep everyone at the same pace? 

I like the SEL idea because I think students and teachers both benefit from it. That's easy and covers one of the days. For the other two, I don't go ahead in the content, but I do expand on the topic we are studying. Teaching from 1760-1900 in U.S. history, we are, "a mile wide and an inch deep" in the content. When I end up with extra time, I dig a little deeper.

For this past week, we were covering Horace Mann and school reform. So naturally, I had my students come up with reform ideas for 2021. There were some very interesting ideas on how to make public education better, as told by my 8th graders.  Below are a few of the more popular ideas:

1) Start school between 9:00-11:00. Their argument was that they did not like to wake up early in the morning, and most of them took a class period or two before they were fully awake. 

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2) "Real Life" class. Students wanted to have the option to take classes that would teach them about taxes, how to take out a loan for a car, and how to do a basic home repair (fix a leaky faucet, change a tire, etc.) 

3) "Real Life" field trips. The students wanted to actually go to some of the places that they talk about in class. Virtual field trips and YouTube tours are nice, but it's not the same. **I looked into taking students to Philadelphia, where the Declaration and Constitution were written, but it is expensive.  Maybe we can take a trip to Lansing or Madison to see how government works.

These ideas may be the next step in making public education better. Thanks to those two-hour delays, students were able to think through some of their ideas and explain them to others.

Thanks, mother nature!

....we get the point...can you PLEASE get temps above zero?