SILVER SPRING, Md. — All the weather-related school delays and closings in the D.C. region this winter have been a challenge to deal with — not just for parents, but for teachers too.
“I grew up and went to school in Montgomery County, so I’m very much used to this, and I had a very different perspective when I was a student,” Hannah Turner tells WTOP. She’s a teacher at Argyle Middle School in Silver Spring.
“I have kids come back now after a cancelled snow day and they say, ‘I didn’t do my homework.’ And these are kids who typically do their homework,” she says.
Once they’re back in the classroom, she says, getting students refocused can be tough.
“It’s really difficult to get them back to where we want them to be the next day.”
Turner teaches ESOL — English for Speakers of Other Languages. Her students are new arrivals to the United States who, in many cases, have never seen snow up close and in person until this winter.
“After our first snowfall — and actually it started snowing while we were still at school — that was a really fun experience. There are no windows in my classroom, and so we couldn’t see when it began. But when students … did have access to windows and they saw that it was snowing, the excitement of 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds who are seeing snow for the first time, which in this area is not something you run into every day, it’s feel-good. It makes you feel really excited for them.”
Turner says she tries not to assign extra homework on snow days.
“I’ll let them enjoy that snow day, especially with a lot of my kids coming from places where they don’t experience snow. I can step back and say, ‘This interrupts my schedule, but this is a novel thing for you to experience. So go ahead, enjoy that. We’ll be writing about it when you come back.’”
She’s able to turns the kids’ chilly experiences into lessons.
“Part of our unit is about weather. We are talking about snow and temperature and how to describe things — adjectives and nouns.”
Turner encourages kids to study when they’re not in class, whether it’s on a snow day or a typical weekend.
“There’s always something I have set up online that the students can access anywhere, and practice with. A lot of teachers at Argyle utilize similar resources.
“I use a couple different online programs. One of them is Duolingo, where students can practice translating from their native language into English language. It’s interactive language practice. I also use Quizlet, which is like online flash cards that also allows you to play study games, take quizzes about the vocabulary or whatever the topics are.”
She can watch in real time which of her students is using these programs, and how well they’re doing.
Turner wakes up at 5 a.m. on school days, and is sometimes ready to go before a decision on whether to delay or close schools is made. But if she finds she got up early for nothing because classes have been called off, she considers it a minor inconvenience: She lives just a 15-minute drive away from the school.
“I appreciate Montgomery County waiting to make a decision [to delay or close] until the morning. I certainly don’t want school to be canceled if that’s not necessary,” she says.
Is Turner ready for spring?
“Yes, yes, yes! I am not a cold-weather person. The excitement with my kids is waning on the snow experience. We are all looking forward to warmer weather.”
