Waking up and realizing school is canceled because of a snow day is one of the best things that can happen to a student. Getting a free day off with no responsibility is so relaxing and can really get rid of some high school stress that tends to build up about halfway through the year when the snow starts falling. Increasingly convenient technology that gives students and teachers the ability to communicate without actually having to speak to each other in person has allowed teachers to assign homework during a student’s snow day.
Teachers are starting to use technology such as texts or emails to assign students homework even when they don’t have to come into school. There are certain websites that allow students to subscribe to a feed of texts, allowing the teacher to communicate with every single one of their students by only sending one text. Here is where students have begun to become enraged with their snow day policies.
“How is it fair that we’re assigned work for school if school is cancelled that day?” senior Nick Sleeper said.
Snow days have traditionally always been a day for relaxation and little to no thought of school or school related activities. Sleeping in until the early afternoon and not changing out of their pajamas are just two of the delicacies that students are treated to when school is canceled. Students bring up good points when they argue that if there isn’t any school, there shouldn’t be any work that should have to be done for a class that they didn’t even have that day.
“I just think it’s so unnecessary to assign homework on a snow day,” Sleeper said. “It’s not that big of a deal to just pick up where you left off the next day.”
However, teachers aren’t wrong in assuming that with such easy ways to communicate with their students, it’s more likely for them to expect that their students should still be doing work. If all it takes is the simple sending of one text that will instantly deliver to every student, teachers believe that students should be responsible enough to not take the entire day off even if they didn’t happen to have school.
As with anything, high school kids will try to find a way to get out of their responsibilities. It’s extremely easy for a student to claim that they didn’t get the text, and therefore didn’t do the work. There is almost no way to prove that a student did, in fact, receive the text and then delete it. Assigning homework on snow days is not a practice taken up by every single teacher in MPS or anywhere else yet. However, with fast advancing technology, the idea of homework on every day of school cancellation is not one that is too far out.
By: Joey Lundahl
