The 6 a.m. alarm goes off, eyes heavy with the sleep fight to focus on the messa
ge on the phone.
It’s a snow day.
Last spring’s semester was filled with multiple snow days as Justin Juliano, a business administration major and math and accounting minor, remembers well.
“There were some classes that I didn’t have for over two weeks because of the snow days,” Juliano said.
Teachers and students alike started off fine with the first few snow days, but as they piled up the semester became more and more challenging in terms of completing work.
“Last spring was really really difficult especially because we lost so many labs and so much of it was really early in the semester,” Dr. Caroline Nielsen, associate professor of biology, said. “I feel like it was very difficult for classes to build up momentum when we kept missing days.
Professors struggled to keep their classes moving in order to ensure students were learning what they needed to from their courses.
Nielsen’s biology 102 course, which includes the use of a fruit fly lab early in the course, is one of many classes that involves a lot of lab equipment that students don’t have access to at home.
“It runs over four weeks and when we had our first cancellation I rearranged things and I adjusted the timing and I figured out how we could do this fruit fly experiment,” Nielsen said. ”When we lost our second lab in the same class I had to cancel the fruit fly experiment because the fruit flies continue[d] to develop.”
Even classes that did not require expensive equipment lost important classroom time.
“The only assignments that I had a chance of completing over email was semester long projects since we worked on them at our own pace and they didn’t require class discussions,”Juliano said.
This year professors are remembering last year and have backup plans in case of snow days, but in cases where expensive lab equipment or interaction with classmates is a central part of the course it could still become a major challenge if snow days were to pile up like they did last spring.
Whether or not this year will be worse than last year is hard to predict, but it is likely that there will be a lot of snow again.
“We know that the climate is changing and we can make good predictions that in general, climate change will lead to more storms,” Nielsen said.
Students may once again welcome the first full snow day as a chance to catch up on some sleep, but professors are ready to send work especially if snow days begin to grow in number.
“All of my teachers have addressed the issue of snow for this semester,” Juliano said. “They stressed that they will make every effort to have assignments available or set up a Blackboard collaborative online classroom so that we do not lose class time.”
