Snow day!!

I am sitting at home today, enjoying my snow day, not having to go in and teach the kids.

You may have noticed that today is Sunday, so I would be sitting at home, watching football, not having to go in and teach the kids anyway. But today it's SNOWING!! :)

Given my district's former tendencies, it is extremely unlikely that school will be cancelled tomorrow, but there's always that 0.0001% chance...

All that snow...

Yesterday, as I mentioned, was a snow day here in Dallas. Not a day off from school, mind you, but a day where we had classes with 3-4 inches of snow on the ground outside. This is about as rare in Dallas, Texas as Britney Spears making sense in an interview.

I usually keep my shades closed in the classroom, but I opened one up so we could see the snow falling out in the courtyard. At around 9:15, I had to open several more, because our power went out and we needed the extra light. The power was out until almost 10:30.

In the meantime, after we got our initial work done (in the low light), I thought I'd give the kids a bit of a reward and take them outside to play in the snow. We got all bundled up and ready to go when one of the administrators walked by and said that no one was allowed to go outside.

D'OH!!! They won't even let us play in the snow!!!

By lunchtime, after-school tutoring had been cancelled, and it was a good bet that school would be cancelled for Friday (today). The kids were admonished, in a PA announcement, to go STRAIGHT to their buses and not play around in the snow.

Of course, as I was leading my class out to the buses, and I kept hearing other teachers shouting, "NO!! Put that snow down!!" I kept thinking, "I can't possibly tell a kid not to make a snowball when I want so desperately to make one myself!!!"

As soon as the first bus took off, I was throwing snowballs at other teachers. It just seemed such a waste of good snow NOT to use it!!

Sure enough, today was an official inclement weather day, and there was no school. While awesome in one sense, it stinks in another, because I had ordered some Valentine's Day flowers to be delivered to my fiance at her school. No go on that one.

But we did take advantage of the snow to build a snowman and take a few pictures. And thankfully, we haven't lost power here yet!

Just a regular school day

It's a little after 7am as I write this. I'm looking out the window, where the snow is coming down somewhat intensely, and the ground is covered in white.

Yet school is open today, just like any other day.

Thank you, DISD.

Risky Cycles

MAN, it is cold down here! You wouldn't expect to hear that coming out of the heart of Texas, but as I stood outside at my early morning duty post amid the falling snowflakes -- wait, you wouldn't expect to hear THAT coming out of the heart of Texas either...

But it's true, it was snowing this morning, and the temperature was in the mid-20s. I don't care where you're from, that's not a lot of fun to be out in for half an hour. I expected the kids to start greeting me with, "Good morning, Mister Popsicle!” And when I got back inside, looking like the Comingeth of the Iceman, the first thing my Assistant Principal said to me was, "You know, it's supposed to be in the teens tomorrow morning..." Time to break out the nuclear-powered longjohns.

In other news, I walked a bit of a fine line today with both of my classes. In the science book, there was a picture of a unicycle. So I took that as an opportunity to talk about prefixes. We were just talking about how quad- and quart- meant four, and the kids know that tri- means three. So I ask them what other word looked a lot like unicycle. They came up with bicycle pretty quickly. So I had them consider what a unicycle looks like and what a bicycle looks like, and I asked them to try to think about what uni- and bi- could possibly mean. They had no problem with that. But as an adult reading this, you can probably see the fine line I was talking about.

Much like the rookie gambler pushing all-in with a jack-10 off suit, I realized I was taking a bit of a risk, but I went ahead and asked the question anyway -- "What other words can we think of that start with uni- and bi-?”

Thankfully, and as I pretty much expected, both of my classes came up with the same words -- unicorn, and bilingual. One little girl did say that bi means when you go to the store and spend money on something, and a boy in the other class suggested “Bye-bye, Mister Teacher.”

But no one brought up the more sensitive word. I think you know which one I'm talking about.

Biplane.

YYISD

Hello, my name is Mister Teacher, and I work for the Yo-Yo Independent School District.

This morning, we had what is known around the world as "freak weather." Sure, up north, freezing rain and a quarter inch layer of ice may not be considered freaky, but down here in Texas, the only thing freakier is Matthew McConaughey's bongo-playing habits.

So I wake up around a quarter till 6 this morning, and the radio dudes are talking about how bad the roads are and how a lot of schools are closing. So I did what I do every morning at 5:45 -- I hit the snooze button. Ditto for nine minutes later. However, a little after 6, I got out of bed and wandered into the living room to watch the TV. Apparently it was snowing, if the television reporters and their immediate surroundings were painting an honest picture. All four of the major stations had crawls on the bottom of the screen, listing all of the schools that were closing and/or opening late. One district was conspicuously absent. You guessed it, Dallas ISD.

Now the policy has always been that school closings are announced on TV by 6:05AM. I sat there and watched the crawl on all four stations to be sure, and Dallas ISD was not listed on any of them.

So I reluctantly began the process of showering, getting dressed, getting in gear, and getting out of the house. As soon as I pulled out of the garage, I felt like I was being salted from above. Small pieces of freezing rain had left a layer of frost on the ground, with more being added every moment.

To make a long story short, my journey to the school took nearly twice the time that it normally takes, but I did arrive in one piece. Out in the parking lot, I encountered two of my fellow teachers engaged in conversation. One of them, like me, was just arriving; the other, was leaving. She told us that school had been canceled after all, and that we could go home.

Sweet -- just what I wanted to do. Get right back out onto the road.

But then, another teacher stuck her head out the door and announced that school had once again been declared open. I couldn't help but get a mental image of one of those plastic bobbing bird toys. Head goes down, school is closed. Head goes up, school is open.

As indecision goes, this seemed to be pretty major. However, it didn't hold a candle to what was going on with the kids. Come to find out later, the buses did in fact leave the "bus barn" at their normal appointed time to pick up the kids. Midway through their route, though, they were told that school had been closed and recalled back to where they had started. THAT'S why I didn't see a single bus pass by during my morning crosswalk duty today. When I got back inside at 7:45 and mentioned that to the principal, she told me that the buses had just been sent back out to pick the kids up.

Now think about this for a second. If YOUR kids were out there waiting on the school bus at the normal time, and it was snowing, and it was 27°F, and maybe you had to use the bathroom pretty bad, and the bus never came -- would you really stand around for more than an hour on the off chance that the bus might be coming late? Well, neither did most of our parents and kids.

By nine o'clock, Mrs. Educator and I had a combined total of 10 kids. Most of them had been dropped off by their parents, though one, maybe two of them came on the late bus.

So as far as that was concerned, it was a nice day. We put all 10 in my room for the first 2 1/2 hours, and the kids and I talked about weather and the difficulty that goes into making accurate forecasts. Then after lunch, Mrs. Educator tagged in and did some reading activities with them while I got a nice new bulletin board completed.

I just hope that we don't have to go through exactly the same thing tomorrow morning, here in the Yo-Yo ISD. Because if we expect our kids to learn from their mistakes, I certainly hope that our adults can as well.