Tuesday morning I woke up in a foul mood.
A nor’easter threatening to dump 6 inches of snow on New York City forced the powers that be to call a snow day, which here does not mean snowmen and sleds and hot cocoa— it means online school.
I hate online school. I hate Zoom. I hate the way my apartment feels at 10:37 on a weekday. I hate sweatpants.
And despite all of the preparations I had made — those aforementioned powers had graciously informed us of the “snow day” the morning before — and in spite of how adept I had become at managing a school remotely and foreseeing snafus, I knew that at precisely 7:30 a.m. the accelerando of notifications would begin and would not cease until at least 9:00 a.m. There would be questions and requests from the school aides, the office staff, teachers, the paraprofessionals, parents and students, all of them time-sensitive, some of them stupid, few of them grammatical, and none, evidently, able to be answered by anyone else but me.
During the pandemic, somewhat against my will and almost entirely because I was the only administrator under 50, I had emerged as my school’s CIO, CTO and CLO1. I was the one who had figured out how to get the kids online, how to count them when they were, and how to ensure teachers were truly teaching.
I learned more in that year-and-a-half than I had in the previous ten, but I the experience fundamentally transformed me. I wouldn’t say I had become cynical, but my mien became as serious and stoic as a Major League baseball coach. For I had become acutely aware of a depressing and frightening reality that I had either chosen to ignore or had not had a high enough vantage point to see: that too many of our most vulnerable children’s futures depended not on the efficacy of systems — on policy — but on the altruism of adults. That the only thing that prevented us from descending into anarchy was that enough people chose to do the right thing. Returning to “in-person” instruction either concealed that truth, or at least made it seem less likely that we’d descend into that anarchy. Either way, I very much wanted to get back in the building.
The one time we’d gone online since the end of the remote era — when smoke from the Canadian wildfires rendered the city’s air unbreathable — I reluctantly dug out my old spreadsheets and protocols like a retired assassin called to do one last job. I finished the day catatonic from exhaustion, even though I’d only sat at my kitchen table working at my laptop (well, three).
I vowed I would quit before I did remote school again.
Yet there I found myself again this past Tuesday morning, sitting at that same kitchen table with my three laptops and the snow falling in fat wet flakes outside my window.
I was not in a good mood, but I was ready.
It did not begin well. good morning mine is not working was one of first messages I received. The following two hundred were effectively the same.
“Intermittent outages” prevented most students and teachers from logging on or joining Google Meets or even accessing their email. IBM was evidently responsible. Students and teachers saw an error message accompanied by the image of single burning candle. On closer inspection I realized it was actually a tiny person standing on a gray column that was emerging — or sinking into — a black hole. Exactly.
By 9:00, I knew there was nothing I could do. I sent out a school-wide message to keep trying. I slammed my laptop(s) shut, announced to my wife that I was hereby forbidding our 2-year-old son from ever participating in remote school, and I took him outside to build his first snowman.
You probably saw the New York Times headline later that day: N.Y.C Revived Remote School for a Day. It was a Mess. The article is the typical pessimistic bullshit you can expect from a Times education piece: quotes from irate parents, cynical educators and grandstanding politicians (most of which the reporter appears to have cadged from social media); nothing less than perfection expected from schools and a detectable glee that they didn’t achieve it; a forced “Even so . . ” paragraph; a hokey closing.
The sub-text of the entire piece was that New York City Public Schools were foolish for trying to make kids go to school on a snow day.
The truth is that by about 11:00 am almost everyone was able to log into their classes and join Google Meets. And when I started visiting them shortly thereafter, here is what I saw in class after class: smiling teachers, real lessons, attentive students.
Yes, attendance was lower than usual, but many classes had close to 75% attendance, which I didn’t think was that bad, considering.
Yes, too many kids had their cameras off, but the chats were alive with constructive conversation, and the students I could see weren’t lying in bed, or obviously scrolling through their phones. They were sitting upright at desks. They had notebooks out. They were working. They were glad to be there.
Kids were learning.
By the end of the last period, I felt hope and I felt joy. There are no other words for it. Hope. Joy.
I also felt ashamed by my earlier petulance, and I felt stupid for forgetting that for many students, remote school on a snow day, far from being “another indignity visited on childhood by the legacy of the pandemic2” is actually a brief respite from their disorderly or unstable lives at home.
I do not intend to portray these children as tragedy cases living meager existences deserving of our pity, and I abhor educators who essentialize students, but it is a simple fact that “snow day” for many of my students does not mean the same thing as the children of the readers of the New York Times (or even of those individuals who tend to get quoted in it.) Many of my students are burdened with caring for younger siblings while their parents bust their ass to pay the bills. Many have suffocatingly strict parents whose overprotectiveness is a necessary shield against neighborhood vices. Many spend every waking hour when they’re not at school gaming or scrolling online, partly because there’s no one to talk to. Many have indifferent or ill-equipped parents, and a few, still, endure outright abuse.
A snow day might have never meant making a snowman with dad. For them, a snow day might have meant another long, rotten day at home.
But now, for them, a snow day is just another day of school, which means structure, and purpose, and those smiling teachers.
What’s so wrong with that?
Above image: “Snow Shovellers, New York.” Clare Leighton. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 1929
Technology, Information, Learning
https://www.wnyc.org/story/news-your-remote-classroom-nyc-snow-day/
Great stuff, Cafeteria. Happy to feature it in the Friday newsletter: https://kappanonline.org/russo-snow-day-meltdown-how-migrant-kids-enrich-schools-an-ed-reporter-meets-two-legends-best-education-journalism-of-the-week-2-16-24/