Mother Nature steals summer days from GHS students

Based off the winter trends of past years, students wouldn’t have guessed they’d get an extra break from school, but that’s exactly what they got! Mother Nature graced Galena with temperatures below 0°.

Because of the snow days, students got an extra 6.5 days off. Some GHS seniors had no problem with this trend of no school because they knew they wouldn’t have to make up the missed days of school. Marion Schultz, ‘19, said, “All my underclassmen friends were complaining about having to make up school, but I didn’t care because I don’t have to make it up.” Graduation for seniors is already set for Sunday, May 19th 2019, so they aren’t required to come back after they’ve already graduated.

Some underclassmen found that having extra days off is not worth it because it is just wasted summer days. Karsyn DuPlessis, ‘21, said, “It [having snow days] stinks because we get less of summer when we could’ve been outside, but instead, we couldn’t do as much because the weather was so bad.”

Not everyone had no new assignments during their snow days. Students in the Calculus class still had to do homework over break. Instead of learning material in class, they had to watch videos and complete what they would’ve in class, and it didn’t make the snow days feel like a real break. Emilly Folks, ‘19, said “I didn’t like how they were assigned over our snow days. The homework definitely killed my second winter break vibe.”

The work was all required to be fully prepared in time for the AP exam that remains at the same date. Mary Calfee, the Calculus teacher said, “Due to the fact that we had so many sequential snow days off of school, in order to remain close to our schedule to be prepared for the AP Calculus test (which is a national test date set and does not move on account of our school’s snow days), we had to push forward in our curriculum.  This meant that Calculus students were tasked with completing a few assignments on their snow days so that when we returned to school we wouldn’t be as far behind.”

Snow days sound great to a student who didn’t complete their homework or are procrastinating it, but in reality, they aren’t as great as they seem. For some students, it’s wasted summer or having to learn material anyway. One day off is nice, but for a lot of people, 6.5 is overkill.