Snow-Day Assignments Benefit All Parties

Editor in Chief Tommy McConville

With the recent “snowmageddon” that hit Louisville, high-schoolers all over the state enjoyed no school, or did they? At the start of this school year, Trinity implemented the snow-day assignment feature on Rockspace.

This is the first year that Trinity has taken the fun away from snow days. The idea was that after the two built-in snow days were used, teachers could assign homework through Rockspace, and it would be due by the next class.

Seeing as I had four days to do nothing but lay around and look at social media, I have noticed my fellow classmates have had mixed feelings about the snow-day assignments. While some students think it’s a crime to assign homework when school is cancelled, others look ahead and see that there will be no added days at the end of the year. Bring on the work.

In previous years, after coming back from snow days, students would often be loaded with homework because of a teacher’s fear of getting behind schedule. With snow-day assignments, the piling on of homework the next day back will be no more. This part of snow-day assignments seems to benefit both the teacher and the student.

In addition to the balancing of homework loads, students will be able to remember what is going on in class during the snow days. While the work might be a pain to do, it will be nice walking into class the next day back and knowing what the teacher is talking about.

Lastly, and by far, most importantly, there will be no days added on to the end of the year. Last year, Trinity had to extend the school year into June because of a required number of hours to finish the year. With snow-day assignments, the year will end on schedule and students will have a longer break.

School is evolving; some classes have switched completely from textbooks to ebooks. Trinity now has an entire site dedicated to cloud-based learning with many different options for collaborating. Unfortunately for students, the Internet has no possibility of crashing on the way to school. Why would schools stop teaching when most are fully capable of doing work through technology? It is clear that a lot of schools around the country have already been doing or are now starting to do what Trinity implemented this year. The question now is what’s next?

Teachers and students are communicating via devices such as YouTube and Skype to connect when classroom interaction fails. School is evolving, and snow-day assignments are just the start of the change to traditional classroom learning. While some students will enjoy the fact that there will be no school at the end of the year, others won’t be so fond of the snow-day curriculum.

Many students need classroom interaction with teachers to process information. Another disadvantage that is obvious among some high school students is the inevitable procrastination that will set in. With a whole day to sit around and do homework, there is always time for more TV.

Despite some of the criticisms of this new implementation, snow-day assignments benefit all parties. School is always subject to the society we live in, and right now, school is adapting to the great technology we have to use.

Snow-Day Assignments Don’t Advance Learning

Staff Reporter Daniel McCarthy

With three of the past four days of a short week cancelled by a snow storm last week, the biggest topic of controversy (aside from having to actually go to school on Friday) has undoubtedly been the online snow day assignments. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Trinity has required that teachers in each class put up an online assignment for snow days. Each class’s assignment is supposed to take an hour, totaling four hours of work each snow day. The first day of this new policy was Wednesday, Feb. 18. The benefits of the snow-day work are that it will require one less make-up day and. . .well, that’s about it.

The belief among those who decided on this snow-day work seems to be that a day of online work is equivalent to a day of learning in the classroom. If we are just going to not make up a day of school, then it is implied that these snow-day assignments are so productive that we will not fall behind in terms of class work. That is the ideal situation at least.

Unfortunately, however, these snow-day assignments are almost 100 percent busy work. Realistically, everybody knows that. How can a student be expected to get any learning out of an online assignment that they are to complete on their own? How can learning be done without the teacher? The fact is learning cannot occur. Students do not truly get anything out of these snow-day assignments.

Some snow-day assignments don’t even pertain to what is currently going on in a class. But to be fair to the teachers, how can they be expected to just whip up, on the spot, an hour of online work that is related to the subjects currently being covered in their classes? It is incredibly more convenient, and more logical for that matter, for them to have snow-day assignments that are somehow related to their class planned out from the beginning of the year. Logical as it may be, though, it does not actually advance learning or keep the class moving at the same pace. Just like before we had online assignments, the class is stalled, due dates are moved, and classes will have to move more quickly to catch up.

Also, where did this sudden need for a solution to snow days come from? For the 62 years Trinity has been a high school, there have been no snow-day assignments, not until this year. Why? Were snow days so detrimental to learning over the past 60 years that this much-needed solution is long overdue? Were these five or six days that school was cancelled significantly hurting the instruction at Trinity High School? Probably not. The snow day assignments are borderline-useless busy work.

No amount of online physics problems or assigned readings are going to compensate for missing a class with a well-trained teacher. Words like “online” and “technology” don’t automatically have positive connotations, Trinity. Sometimes, the traditional way of doing things hasn’t yet changed because it’s the best way to do things.

(Editor’s note: Both of these opinion pieces were written as snow-day assignments.)