Snow Day

Moot Points

Dreaming of a snow day

Marty Rempel

Today my car started reluctantly. My car’s high-tech thermometer told me it was -25C. My Blackberry told me it was -34C without a wind chill. If ever there was a reason to stay home from school this was it.

But of course I had to go to school. I’m a teacher. I’d leap buildings with a single bound if I had to. However, when I arrive at school, I discover that it’s -38C—the buses aren’t running, and 60 per cent of the student population is not to be found.

I also discover that today the winter road has been declared officially open. The gates to freedom and consumerism have lifted and half the town has driven south to balmy, exotic Fort McMurray. I pondered the apparent irony as to how kids could not get to school but could travel with their families 280 km south to the oil sands capital of the world.

I had just moved from the Middle East to northern Alberta, and my body and soul were still in transition and shock. My Kuwaiti students were masters at finding ways and means to miss school in a school year already 20 days shorter than our own. If the severe dust storms, high humidity and debilitating temperatures did not keep the kids away, then the Kuwaiti parliament would, by declaring, at the last possible moment, yet another national holiday. Missing school is universal and cross-cultural and we only have ourselves and nature to thank.

I have to admit I was no better as a kid. I prayed for snow days. Growing up in a world with only 13 TV channels, I couldn’t flip to the weather channel to see if school was cancelled—I had to rely on first-hand observations. If the snow drifts covered the front stairs and the back door was blocked by snow, there was a good chance I’d not be going to school that day. In practical, logistical terms there was always margin for error, though, so I found it prudent, as I made subtle comments about the depth and breadth of the snow drifts, to add a small convincing and persistent hacking cough, in a desperate bid to influence my mom to rule the day as a no-fly zone—an official stay-at-home-play-day.

But I was not always successful, and a chill ran through me as my mother reached for her coat and advised me to do the same. I was going to school. I was mortified as mom bundled me up and loaded me into a sleigh, the type with the curved metal runners. To my great embarrassment (I was in Grade 3), she pulled me through the mighty drifts all the way to Prince Phillip Public School. I felt like Dr. Zhivago after Lara was taken from him.

On these high-pressure, blue sky, -40 days in beautiful Alberta, I think of my mom and her Protestant-German work ethic that I have grown to respect and sometimes emulate. I have to admit that when tensions are high, the work load deep or the students onerous, I find myself in my classroom looking out the window, studying cloud patterns in the hopes of  predicting a snow day, or if nature has its unpredictable way, a sandstorm of Biblical proportions. 

When is Ramadan this year?

Marty Rempel is the special education coordinator, Athabasca Delta Community School.