Snow Day!

The sweetest two words to any teacher’s ears (well, other than “summer vacation” :)), and the only good reason to receive a phone call at 5 in the morning. 🙂

A lot of my peers use snow days as chances to catch up on grading or get ahead on planning. For my part, I always make a point not to do any schoolwork during the snow day. Borrowing from Catholic liturgiology I like to view a snow day as a “day out of ordinary time”, a gift, a break from the crazy schedule we all impose on ourselves. This inevitably leads to feelings that I’ve “wasted” a day but I usually get past those pretty quickly. I think my mental health stands higher for missing the day than it would if I had “achieved” something.

I think I stumbled onto that way back in grad school (although, admittedly, there were certainly no snow days in northern CA). Once you recognize that your workload is, in essence, infinite, it can set you free. By definition, you can never make any progress on an infinite workload; no matter how hard you try, the remaining work is, well, infinite. So what’s the point of throwing every last minute at the problem? It’s not going to get any less “solved” if you take some hours, or a day, for yourself. Obviously, it’s important not to sink to an actually zero work rate; but there’s no sane reason to pursue a transfinite one.

My greatest disappointment today was that the snow had stopped even before we got The Call. (Though Hun is nominally a boarding school, we draw about 2/3 of the high school body from the surrounding area, including up to an hour away. Many of our students come from northern Bucks County in PA, on the other side of the Delaware; and they tend to suffer a lot more weather than we do. So a lot of times, we’re closed even when the weather in Princeton is not so bad.) A favorite snow day pass-time is to sit and watch the snow while sipping hot chocolate and whipped cream — and it just so happens I had a delivery from peapod.com last night including, of course, hot chocolate and whipped cream. Sadly, it was not to be, as we received only ice rain and all of that fell before 6 AM. *sigh*

After crashing again in bed for a couple of hours after The Call, I roused myself to get brunch at the cafeteria … which took an unheard-of one hour. Normally, it’s pretty easy to slip in at the start of brunch and get a quick breakfast. The flaw today was subtle: Last night, we didn’t know we would be having off. So the teachers on duty made the kids respect our usual school-night Lights Out time, which is 11 PM. Hence, all the angels were well-rested and ready for breakfast at 10:30. On a normal weekend, they stay up to ridiculous times and can’t roust themselves out of bed by the end of brunch at 11:30. Today they just clogged up the works. 🙂

After finally getting brunch, I did some computer maintenance. Installing my new photo printer knocked Windows XP for a loop. Even though each new version of Windows is trumpeted as having finally solved the instabilities that define Microsoft products, I have yet to see such promises realized. Here, the new printer driver joined forces for one of those voluntary-mandatory Windows security patches to throw the OS into conniptions. All in all a frustrating thing which took the sparkle off finally having a photoprinter at home.

I rewarded myself with a nap in the afternoon. I’m not even the type to usually take naps, but it’s a point of principle on a snow day. 🙂 The afternoon was devoted to Lincoln at Gettyburg, which I would have sworn I’d read before but which seems new to me this time. I hope I’m not starting to forget things I’ve read. It’d be far too much work to repave my brain with books I’ve already consumed. I also did a tiny bit of writing but not as much as I’d hoped.

Then I did actually waste time — two hours on the Pysch marathon on the Sci Fi Channel. I am really not looking for yet another hour to devote to the tube weekly, so I’ve been avoiding the second season of Psych even though I truly enjoyed the first one. (I’m also a fan of Dule Hill, who was woefully underused on The West Wing once Sorkin left.) But what the heck — it’s a snow day! Time wasting is de riguer.

Then I jotted this quick note. And now you know, in more detail than you could possibly care for, how I spend my days out of ordinary time.