teachwatts: The End of the Snow Day as We Know It

Remember the good old days when you would wake up in the morning and sit by your radio as the list of school closings would be rattled off in the wee hours of the morning? Growing up in Buffalo, NY definitely gave me many of these experiences. I would wait day after day to hear my school listed among the many, only to be disappointed again and again because my school happened to have a reputation as a school that never closed. But on the rare occasion that it did close, it was amazing. We would have an entire day where we could play in the snow, drink hot chocolate, cuddle up by the fireplace and watch movies. They were simply magical.

I am afraid that those days are becoming less and less in our lives. At the International School Bangkok, we are working very hard to make sure those days won't happen again in the future. Now I am well aware that we don't have a lot of snow to worry about in Bangkok, but we do have the threat of H1N1 at our door. International schools are closing to the right and left of us. To combat the loss of potential school days, we are encouraged to utilize a moodle tool that we call PantherNET. Our courses are slowly becoming online courses to enable us to teach if unseen foreclosure should happen.

Although I agree with the purpose, and it is great to have everything online, why do we constantly insist that we take our work home with us? As a teacher living abroad, I am never away from my students. I cannot walk out my door without passing the home of one of my students. They email me, leave comments on the class blog, see me after school and at weekend soccer games. Most of the time I embrace every minute of it, but there are times I do not.

Are we, as a society, pushing it too far when we require people to always be accountable 24/7? Why do I have to answer every phone call? Sometimes, I love not being accessible to everyone. I will be on a trip in Laos over the next few days, and I am so happy to step away from my computer. I need to and my children need me to do so as well. It is the October break for our school, and I have already put in over 11 hours of grading, and 5 hours of planning. Let me mention that it is only Monday. Some days I still wish for a snow day and not one where I am required to teach and be accountable to everyone. We need to remember that education equals more than the content, it blossoms with the proper delivery. The explosion of web 2.0 has changed the teaching and learning landscape, but is it always for the betterment of society as a whole?

The Snowy day image can be found at Ezra Jack Keats Homepage

2 comments:

Shirleyville, October 20, 2009 12:07 PM: Right on, sister! We are here with four teachers grading and I am reading your post aloud. We need a virtual snow day, in which we lose the internet as well. That would solve our problems, eh?
mscofino, November 6, 2009 1:01 PM: Sometimes I think I have to make those "snow days" for myself. Unfortunately not only do I feel guilty about doing it, but I'm usually thinking all day about what I "should" be doing and how others are counting on me to do this or that.

I do think that sometimes simply the availability of so much communication leads to this feeling of pressure to be connected, but I also think we're in a transition time as a society and we will get through it.

I'm thinking about the invention of the telephone, and later, the answering machine. We were able to work that new technology into our lives to the point where we feel we now have more control (maybe not total, but at least more), eventually I'll think we'll get to the same point with web 2.0 tools as well.