A school board in South Carolina has launched a pilot program to get rid of snow days and instead have students work from home when the weather turns treacherous. Beyond depriving schoolkids of the joys of weather-enforced truancy, the plan will exacerbate the region's digital divide for student who don't have internet access at home.
Anderson County School District Five will be the first region to participate in the pilot program this upcoming school year. In the past, Anderson County had makeup days tacked on to the end of the school year in lieu of days missed due to bad weather, but most kids ended up just skipping them, according to a local news report.
Students from grades 3 through 12 in the school board are already given Chromebooks to use at home, so in the event of a snow day or other inclement weather that causes a shutdown, kids will be expected to log on from home, communicate with teachers, and complete assignments.
Source: MotherBoard
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:25PM (4 children)
Not really. The will just give out 'free' hotspots to kids to take home. They just did that here.
Expect them to be asking for even more of your dollars via taxes.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by edIII on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:06AM (3 children)
-- Dennis Leary
People that whine about even more tax dollars being used for poor people, are often the same people that don't bat an eye about dishonorable and abhorrent Americans (and foreign interests) that are being personally enriched to ridiculous degrees so that America can have the largest military on Earth. The biggest abuser, and the men with guns demanding your taxes, is the military industrial complex. It doesn't even really provide for that much GDP, with the income inequality being what it is between employers and workers. Of course, the soldiers themselves barely get paid shit and go to war with paid mercenaries (by the same government) affording the body armor instead.
War is sexy though. Big ol' fucking erections. A real national security threat like malnourished and under educated children all over America? NAH! Fuck that. They had it on themselves. I ain't paying no taxes to make sure we don't have fucking mentally challenged morons making up our population in 25 years, no siree. A billion dollar cruise missile? Let me get my wallet.
Seriously. Stop being a fucking idiot. Some things simply must be done, and complaining that have you to pay for it is counterproductive and stupid. If you had any real gripes based on principles, then attack the military industrial complex. It's a military budget that is chock full of privatized profits and socialized losses, and not nearly enough intelligence or ROI. Just even a moderate cut back in that budget, and we could afford multiple chrome books each, actual adequate supplies for teachers, and fucking Uber's to get kids to school.
Public education is not some socialist pinko-commie conspiracy to achieve the totalitarian state whilst simultaneously effecting taxation without representation.
Stop being an asshole. The kids are quite literally worth your future, even if you don't have kids yourself.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:39AM
Chromebooks and other proprietary devices are hardly necessary for education. If computers are needed at all, they should all run only Free Software. But, outside of teaching Computer Science, these devices will just serve a distraction and will not somehow improve the quality of the education being offered.
This is just a handout to large corporations, much like with the textbook situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @12:06AM
No, cunt, the only asshole is you. Children are not in fact someone’s future if they don’t have kids. You want kids? You pay for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @02:37PM
"My future" is a dirt nap, sooner or later. Kids around will not change that and there are enough people younger than me that I don't feel the need to worry about new babies being made. So no, they're not worth "my future."
They may be worth the future of the species, but first show me why I should care about that, either.
But even were I interested in the future of humanity or thought my own personal future relied on people getting it on in 2018, that does not stop me from seeing that lots of tech companies get big payouts for selling schools that every kid should be given a computing platform at no cost to them. And that the "learning" that goes on in such environments in markedly poorer compared to paying a teacher to come up with lesson plans and actually teach students using a dumb whiteboard and paper handouts. (Especially as opposed to being a hand-holder and slave to a state-mandated core curriculum set and not going past that.)
The point is... will engaging in the process actually get students to learn more and better by taking snow days away and replacing them with online lessons? Is the number of days tacked on that the kids missed actually vital instructional time that was missed? Or is this just a way to fatten up the masses and result in a higher tax return for no meaningful educational return?
I now return to my self-introspected naval gazing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:01PM (23 children)
That's all we ask, and yet the government cannot even do that.
Chromebooks won't help.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:23PM (2 children)
What? Giving kids junkware from privacy-hostile companies like Google won't improve our school system? Impossible! Everything must be proprietary, and everything must be In the Cloud. That will surely solve the problem of schools not being able to educate children about anything more advanced than the absolute basics.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:54PM (1 child)
And the absolute basics isn't being taught sometimes and they still get passed through.
But now they'll know how to suck the Google teat and the Microsoft teat will maybe dry up?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @07:35PM
There's an easy solution to all of this, and it's that we need more easily-quantifiable, cheap, and standardized multiple choice tests that test almost entirely for rote memorization. That will appease the masses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @07:40PM (19 children)
Are textbooks even necessary to learn to do math? Honest question. The only thing that I ever used my math textbook for was copying out the assigned problems.
Seems like a spreadsheet and a printer would be sufficient for the majority of math, at least at the elementary level.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 04 2018, @08:46PM (15 children)
Not with competent teachers, no. Phillips Exeter for example dropped their textbooks... And all the busy work problems. And the artificial divisions in high school math between subject areas.
All the students get a teacher-produced set of around 1000 problems per year. Sparse explanations to be added to when necessary by teachers. Very little repetitive symbolic manipulation. Just a handful of varied problems each night for discussion the next day. Few repetitive algorithms. Lots of thinking.
Materials available free here [exeter.edu].
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:17PM (2 children)
Why did the man cross the road?
His screams of agony did nothing. How had this happened? Little Jimmy had just been walking to school when a certain figure came from across the road. Now, that figure was brutally raping and beating the boy, all the while chortling at his suffering. Yes, the word "mercy" was nowhere to be found in this monster's vocabulary.
Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! One after another, Jimmy's bones snapped. They snapped even when he screamed. They snapped even when he bled. And they continued to break even when he himself was broken. The large figure sighed in satisfaction and returned to the other side of the road, to wait, to watch, and to smile.
I ask again: Why did the man - that obese, hideous, monstrous, and violent man - cross the road...?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:53AM
You're just not getting it, are you. The original guy had this down to an artform. You are a copycat. Not a very good one either. This sucked. Get up your game if you're going to try this.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:24PM
He was stapled to the fucking chicken.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:53PM (6 children)
I like the principle behind this, but the repetitive symbolic manipulation and stuff like it should not be so easily discounted. Math takes practice, just like a foreign language or learning music. You can spend a lot of time thinking and discussing noun declinations and sentence structure, but to really learn it you need to practice it. Same with being tortured by playing your scales.
I am a big proponent of keeping calculators and computers out of the hands of students for as long as practical for pretty much the same reasons. In the same manner, doing the calculations in one's head or by hand allows one to develop an intuitive understanding of numbers that is lost if one has only used a calculator as a crutch. There are trivial examples, such as the high school student who can't make simple change (a few days ago at a food truck my bill was $10.91 and I gave the young lady $11.01 to avoid getting back any pennies, and she had to confirm on her phone what my change was supposed to be), but I have this fear that as time goes on, we get less and less capable engineers and physical scientists who have lost physical and mathematical intuition because they've become overly-dependent upon their modeling and simulation code, for instance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:16PM (4 children)
What kind of practice? Mindlessly memorizing patterns and routines does not cause one to think like a mathematician (i.e. understand how and why everything works). It just helps with memorization. People like to pretend that rote memorization is under some huge threat, but our current school system is a rote memorizer's wet dream.
Also, how much practice? Some individuals learn faster than others, while others learn slower. We need to get rid of this idea that everyone needs to do 50 'Find the missing side of the triangle.' problems. One-size-fits-all approaches are horrendous, even if they are cheap and easy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:12PM (2 children)
The kind described by the link in this post. [soylentnews.org]
Mindlessly memorising scales doesn't make a musician - but some of it has to be done at some stage.
As much practice as needed and no more.
Agreed. Now we just need to fund all levels of education appropriately. I don't have any experience in the US education system, but it seems we have some problems in common.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:10AM (1 child)
Some memorization is necessary, so we agree on that. If you did not memorize anything, you'd have nothing to work with. Currently, however, there is so much focus on memorization that it impedes people's ability to understand the material.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday August 05 2018, @04:19AM
On this side of the puddle one of the problems we have is the lack of specialised teachers, so that there are times that the nearest warm body in the staff room takes maths classes - in which case the teacher also doesn't really understand the material.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:16AM
Rote memorization is indeed of basically no value except in a few cases where you need to bootstrap something as declarative knowledge or where it just is what it is.
However, an ideal course would have portions of a module that are made of just learning the pattern as well as sections where you're playing with the patterns to see how they relate to each other and what they're properties are and how they work.
Which is the basic path that everybody that gets good at math goes through. They'll learn new methods and they'll play with the methods. Over time they'll have more intuition about what to try and they'll have the analytical skills necessary to identify when a technique is likely to fail as well as why it didn't work.
There's a huge amount of memorization that goes into becoming good at math, but definitely not rote, and it takes a great deal of time to properly develop one's skills. I've been doing math professionally for years and there's still new stuff I learn and put together to deal with things that I hadn't previously done and I'm not even dealing with higher levels of math or necessarily different math problems.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:11AM
Out of curiosity, did you bother to look at the materials I linked to, or just criticized them without bothering to see how they work?
Because there is repetition. In fact, there is in some ways more repetition than in a typical math curriculum -- it's just that you circle back to topics periodically over several years rather than "Today we will learn a simplified algorithm to solve this symbolic kind of equation. Now go home and do 1-49 odd (which are all basically the same sort of problem)." And then you see that kind of equation on the next test, and then you may not see it again for three years.
Instead, you will get the algorithms reinforced over time, much more effectively (like language learning) with gapped repetitions. And you'll use those symbolic methods for actual application problems, rather than primarily abstract symbolic manipulation.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:24AM (4 children)
There are a few stages of learning something.
There's "I don't understand it", followed by "I understand the concept but don't see how to do it", then "I understand it when you show me an example" to "I am shaky at it but can get through some of the simpler examples" to "I can do it, but slowly" to "I have it mastered."
The two keys to this process are instruction and practice. A textbook isn't necessarily involved, but may help. But practice *is* involved, and doing a certain number of the problems on a freshly learned topic provides the practice that allows one to cycle through the stages of learning to the "mastered it" stage.
A teacher should know his students and assign as few or as many problems as he believes will accomplish this; their simply appearing in a textbook does not mean they are automatically assigned as homework if sanity is involved in the process anywhere.
TL;DR assigned problems are not "busy-work" unless the assignment is excessive.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:30AM (1 child)
The alternative perspective is that math is a sort of language with various solution strategies taking the place of communication strategies. You learn sentence forms and grammatical forms and vocabulary through dynamic use over time. That's the most effective way to learn a language, anyway.
So what if you did that to math? Your presuppositions about how math is SUPPOSED to work in practical problems is great -- but in practice what tends to happen is a teacher assigns a bunch of similar problems one night. The student who gets it right away is probably not learning a lot after a few of them. The student who doesn't get it likely struggles and gets most of them wrong, so they don't get the benefit of the supposed practice either. Then, many teachers tend to move onto the next topic, leaving some frustrated and behind and others who got it right away doing unnecessary busy work.
Yes, this is poor teaching (and could be handled better with traditional books), but it happens quite often.
The approach I linked to (which, I agree, is not the only way to structure a good curriculum) instead circles back regularly to problems that will require reinforcement, but with longer gaps between practice. Just like in language learning, encountering a vocabulary word once or twice per week for several weeks is likely a lot better for retention and learning than getting that word 25 times in an assignment one night and then never seeing it again for a year or more.
You run into a problem doing this in a traditional math curriculum though, because it tends to be pretty linear. You may not practice the same exact skills again next week, but if you didn't understand the principles, you may not be able to comprehend the new material at all. Exeter solved that problem partly by intermingling various separate subjects -- algebra, geometry, probability/stats, and various types of problems -- so you can cycle around in these various areas and revisit without running into the linearity problem as much.
It's certainly not perfect and takes the right sort of teacher. But it is a valid approach that I think spends more time in deeper applications and understanding rather than mindlessly repeating algorithms and abstractions inefficiently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:22AM
One of the big aha moments I had in helping students learn was when I started to apply the lessons I'd learned about teaching English as a foreign language to working with math. Breaking everything down into individual steps with precisely one operation done per step. As controversial as Krashen is, he does have a point about comprehensible input even if it's difficult to prove or verify experimentally. But, if you do break everything down into simple bite sized chunks the brain will absorb a lot of it as well as possibly give the student the ability to improvise and efficiently compare different methods of doing things.
In my experience, a lot of the problems with math education, at least in the US, is that while there are better methods available for teaching, there isn't adequate focus on what the research says and there isn't sufficient focus on other methods of interacting with the subject. There aren't enough times for the students to explain what's going on and why. There's not enough opportunity for the students to play around with the math patterns that are being taught to get to know them. And students often aren't provided with adequate guidance in determining what to just memorize and what they really need to understand.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:37AM (1 child)
I should also note that this works at Exeter because math classes have ~10-15 students and ALL are expected to participate in constant discussion, presenting their work to the rest of the class, etc. So there's nowhere to hide. If you don't get something, your deficits and misunderstandings will be rapidly sorted out in class discussion.
With larger classes or without good teachers as discussion facilitators, this approach may not work as well.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday August 05 2018, @04:27AM
You DO understand that several politicians' puppies died when you wrote that... that... heresy.
/sarcasm for the literal minded
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @04:53AM
As a math professional, the answer is no. I've been tutoring math for years and will be teaching it in the near future. Math books are not written to be read by students. The wording is unclear, the examples are incomplete and often the math isn't even correct.
The sad thing is that on the whole they're even worse than they were 20 years ago as they've focused on including diverse pictures of people and chasing the latest fad.
The best style remains a series of completely worked out example problems with commentary about the decisions that were made in solving the problem and the context in which the problem occurred written in plain language. With math terms explained and used for precison rather than to appeal to individuals holding higher degrees.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:17PM
I think you're asking "What is Kumon?" and you can get the answer from Google or any Asian tiger mom.
My kids tried it in Elementary school and did not really take to it, but it does apparently work for people who put in the time (and money).
My kids, not being Asian, were pretty much the only non-Asians in the room. Asians are civilized high IQ people, its not like I was sending them to Somalia or Walmart or McDonalds; it was a pretty chill experience. Admittedly everyone in the room, including my kids, was a child of an engineer, programmer, or manager, so there's some cherry picking WRT presence of civilized behavior.
The general Kumon concept is repetitive exercise to memorize what to do, until instant almost reflexive response is easy. Definitely more of an "cardio" outlook on learning as opposed to a "weight lifting" outlook on learning. It can be just a little boring and slow paced...
Kumon also offers (offered?) reading, in the sense of read a heck of a lot and answer worksheet questions to verify comprehension. At least reading can theoretically be fun and interesting, unlike a giant page of "multiplications of seven" worksheet.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 06 2018, @02:44PM
Kinda, yeah. The textbook provides a framework. Not just for the student, but for the teacher. A really good teacher's edition discusses the subjects at hand and has base layouts for lesson plans in them. A really great teacher and textbook will take the textbook material and re-present it in a method that the student understands more easily than simply reading it. (Though there are students who learn more easily by actually reading the text rather than having it spoken/written on the board).
Then again, I'm the guy who never resells his textbooks. And once every second or third year I come across a problem where I go get my textbook to refresh myself on the steps about how to solve them.
Then again again, I'm weird. (As are many of us here...)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:20PM (14 children)
Living in this region of the US. They are ridiculous with the 'snow days'. I grew up in an area that would get 6+ inches of snow at least 3-6 times a year. We were ready for it. It is going to snow sometimes. You *might* get 1 or 2 days off a year.
In this southern area it basically snows and is gone within a day MAYBE two. I am talking 1-2 inches here MAYBE once or twice a year. They make it like it is the second coming and Armageddon is upon us. You just do not drive and you are pretty good. Instead we have people emptying the shelves like a hurricane is rolling in and the next food shipment is in 6 months. Now the schools take it to the next level. In my district they canceled school 8 times this year. It snowed one of those times. Here is an idea. Do like the rest of the country. Get up at 4AM on a night where it may snow and make your decision. You then work with the local news stations to tell them. Instead of 'no school tomorrow because it might snow'.
So instead of the school admin DOING their job. They are going to crack out millions of dollars in what amount to showoff blingy toys. These dingalings have schools where the teachers are buying their own markers, chalk, and other supplies. If you can not even get the basics for a school correct, putting computers in the mix is not going to help one bit. On top of that it will make your budget problems much worse.
My bet is the program crashes and burns. Then leaves a smoking hole in their budget.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:57PM (1 child)
> You just do not drive and you are pretty good.
The one closure, when there was snow, could be justified. In areas where drivers aren't accustomed to snow (Atlanta for example), it makes sense not to run the school buses when there's even a little snow. I'm assuming they have buses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:29PM
Most of the south does not salt or sand, and if you're in the hills or mountains, they won't let school buses drive in unsafe conditions. Can't explain the grocery store behavior when someone just mentions the word snow....
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:18PM (9 children)
A funny thing about snow days though. If it's mild, kids miss a day at most. If it's more severe, they'll have quite a time using their chromebooks after trees have taken out the power and cable broadband.
Perhaps what is really needed is for school officials to get over themselves and quit wasting so much time during the existig school year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:36PM (8 children)
> after trees have taken out the power and cable broadband
This story is about South Carolina.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:40PM (5 children)
There's some pretty damned tall trees in SC. An 80' pine wasn't remotely rare around the Charleston suburbs when I lived there.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:29AM (4 children)
And what happens is that the trees grow lots of nice branches. When ice comes, the ice freezes to the tree's branches, making them much, much heavier. The tree, or large, frozen-together portions of it, then fall, taking out the power, cable, broadband, whatever's on the nearby utility poles.
This has happened to me in both North and South Carolina. The less dense the population in your area, the slower they come to repair it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 05 2018, @02:37AM (3 children)
Well aware of this. I was in Charleston when Hugo came through, so I got intimately acquainted with what kind of trees were around. They're much easier to inspect when they're laying sideways on your neighbor's house. GP appeared to be insinuating that there weren't any respectable trees to speak of in SC, which would be horribly incorrect.
Oklahoma also gets really nasty ice storms every five years or so and I lived in a little podunk town that was pretty low on the utility company's priority list. This is where having a wood burning stove in your shop building comes in really, really handy.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:49PM (2 children)
I was insinuating that they don't have any respectable snowfall—something you insinuated in another comment.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday August 05 2018, @07:02PM (1 child)
The snowfall, light sometimes, heavy others, does in fact not get much respect from snow snobs.
I first held a snow shovel at age 36 because I was visiting a friend in Chicago. This is a win. Game, set, and match.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 06 2018, @10:53AM
That is indeed a win. Fuck Beta^WSnow!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday August 06 2018, @12:14AM
And my post was due to long experience living in Georgia (one state to the south for the geographically challenged). We either get light snow that's gone in a day or we get about a weeks worth of ice accompanied by downed trees and associated power loss.
The former isn't enough disruption to the school year to fret over (since it happens less than once a year) and the latter, as I pointed out, will see many students UNABLE to log in from home (and a few more who will SAY they were unable).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @12:58PM
Are you suggesting SC doesn't have trees or above ground power lines?
Because I can assure you they have a lot of both.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:11AM
That's the thing now isn't it? In areas that typically get enough snow for this to be a possible problem, they tend to have snow plows and the like to clear things up in order to get back to classes promptly. Perhaps there's a significant blizzard from time to time that causes snow days, but typically it's a non-issue. You might start a bit late, but that's it.
There are places like Seattle where it rarely snows and when it does snow you have to deal with both the hills and unknown type of snow, but typically even here it's rare to have enough snow that it's an issue. There are extra days added to the schedule to account for that. And in rare cases the schedule of the year can be extended to meet the required days of instruction.
Let the kids have a day or two to enjoy the snow, it's not like they're going to be kids forever and if this even comes up, they probably don't have many chances to enjoy snow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @02:54PM
Even in the central midwest that happens. We used to have a rule that if the rural school district closes our company would close that day. This would be both for safety and so our parent-employees wouldn't have to scramble to look for babysitters. The district rule was strictly on the opinion whether it was safe to have the buses on the streets and usually required either significant icing and/or blizzard-level snow that the plows couldn't keep up with. And that might result in a single day's loss ever other year. Now, if the temperature approaches 0 Farenheit they'll close because they're worried that kids might not have appropriate clothing to wait for the buses to arrive / what if a bus breaks down? One year we had four or so days like that plus two or three days where it actually wasn't safe to drive. (In my day, that was the parents' responsibility, and the school would help out poverty cases where they literally could not afford heavy clothes. But that was more Northerly than where I am now and you could rely on sub-zero temps for part of Winter). Now our company's rule is that is the post office ceases mail delivery or if a combination of hospitals cease all non-emergency activities and largest employer in town closes doors. It has to be worse than just the schools close down.
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:21PM (16 children)
I suppose SC folks never have ice storms, when the power is out and roads are impassable for several days...
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:29PM (15 children)
They have maybe two inches of snow total every three years. No ice storms at all in the five years I lived there.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday August 04 2018, @07:14PM (11 children)
I have a longer memory, as do some of the folks in charge (or maybe their parents). Some years no snow, most years an inch or two during two or three days, occasionally an actual storm with ice for days or weeks and things grind to a halt.
I remember three such real storms: 1972 (snow + ice for weeks), 1989 (some snow then mostly ice for a week or so), and one in the mid/late 1990s whose date I don't recall (crippling ice for about two weeks). These don't have much to do with the establishing of the school calendar because they are so infrequent. And anyway, most storms that shut things down for this kind of period of time are hurricanes.
The "an inch or two for a day or two", and preparation for those, do factor into the school calendar.
There exists a culture of people here who believe that since their monster truck has knobby tires and four-wheel-drive, that they can cheerfully drive in ice or snow just as insanely as they live the rest of their lives. And while four-wheel-drive helps with acceleration, it doesn't do anything for braking, as these drivers find out by crashing into targets such as other drivers.
Now add the ones who don't have monster trucks, but still feel, through inexperience with winter conditions, that they are driving superheroes (but in fact are merely road hazards). This phenomenon is a real thing, and adds to the already hazardous conditions present on a snowy or icy road here in the Carolinas.
Poor road conditions, or their likelihood, are generally seen here culturally, rightly or wrongly, as cause to close schools and government offices because those closures prevent many of the injuries and deaths that would otherwise be caused by the unsafe drivers.
This wasn't much of a problem until state laws in the last several decades about enforcing a minimum number of days a student must attend a full day of school in order to be promoted to the next grade.
One might think that if a disaster occurs, the collective wisdom of our educators would put a plan in place to deal with its effects on the school calendar, and that once was the case. Now, however, aliens could attack during a blizzard in the middle of the hurricane of the millennium, and all the kids would either go to school through it all somehow, or have to repeat the affected school year under state law regardless of achievement recorded or progress made.
They's certain laws whut make you think we ain't got whut you might call the brightest bulbs on the legislative trees round these parts.
This is frustrating for school administrators, who by-and-large are not idiots, and who are faced with finding ways to do the impossible as required by state law. Giving kids credit for a "full day" if they sit home and answer an e-mail isn't a bad approach, considering the constraints that they are working under.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 04 2018, @07:52PM (8 children)
I'll just add to this that it's much less likely to get a "snow day" in SC (or many Southeastern states) and more likely to get a "freezing rain day" (or a chance of sleet or whatever). And those sorts of events (or at least a good chance of them) can happen several times per season, particularly in the western (more mountainous) part of the state, which is being discussed in TFA.
The problem isn't only stupid drivers. It's the lack of freezing weather infrastructure like plows and most importantly salt and salt trucks. Freezing rain is difficult to predict almost everywhere, because it depends very precisely on where the freeze line falls. In northern states that have infrastructure to prepare for such events, they can pretreat roads, and if there's a BRIEF period where precipitation turns frozen, the salt and other treatments are enough to handle it.
In the Southeast, this simply doesn't happen most places, and it's surprising how little frozen mix it takes until cars start to slide around like an ice rink... Even if you're a careful driver.
You're right that this is then exacerbated by people who don't know how to drive in winter weather. But the overall reason why many schools get closed frequently in the Southeast is the fear of that wintry mix, which is often most difficult to predict.
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:44PM (7 children)
Speak for yourself. I can drive perfectly well (by which I mean without accident not at the same speed) on anything my vehicle will move in. I'm well aware most people in the south are shitty drivers even in perfectly ordinary rain though. I'd much rather drive through downtown Chicago than Houston if there's any type of weather at all.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:06PM (6 children)
Here's a fun fact for you. Sometimes during a southern snow storm, your car actually won't move significantly. The wheels just spin. If you're unlucky, they might briefly catch on a pebble and send you into a ditch.
More fun, those road conditions are often mixed with patches of road that are just wet. If you get moving on a wet patch, you may find yourself sliding on a patch of black ice where no amount of braking, accelerating, or steering is even slightly relevant to your speed and direction of travel.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:12PM (5 children)
Been through more than a few, yep. Ice storms are a whole lot more fun than regular old winter weather too. Snow or patchy ice is a hell of a lot easier to drive on than a solid sheet of ice that covers half the state. A half dozen bags of cement or similar in the back of the truck make it easier but you still have to know what you're doing and always play it safe.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:25PM (4 children)
I just stay off of the road, mostly because of people that have somehow convinced themselves that they can regain control by flooring it. I don't want to be anywhere near them when physics shows them they're wrong.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:41PM (3 children)
Heh, I just stay well back from everyone, take my time, be very careful, and keep on truckin.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:32AM (2 children)
I hate to come to TMB's defense in anything, but I have driven thousands of miles in snow accident-free and that's exactly my approach.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 05 2018, @02:42AM
You know what's a worse pain than icy roads? Pogonip fogs. You already can't see for shit for the fog, then your mirrors and any windows that don't have a lot of heat warming them get a thick coating of ice on them. They are not fun when you're trying to make it from OKC to Chicago in eight hours.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @02:09PM
The problem is with the person tailgating you.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:10PM (1 child)
That's it in a nutshell. I learned to drive in Maine and Vermont. I love driving in the snow actually. Where I live we usually get about 1-2 weeks of bad roads per year -- frozen compacted snow and I'm always amused (unless its coming toward me or from behind) with the 4x4s in the ditch. I give myself every advantage -- I too have a 4wd car but I also have top rated snow tires, and I drive at a speed that does not exceed normal stopping distance on dry roads. You don't even really need 4wd except for going through deep stuff -- it's the tires that matter and I've driven plenty of 2wd cars (front and back) safely and easily through bad conditions. Every year though, I see some knucklehead trying to get up a small incline with their "all season" tires, just spinning and making steam.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:13PM
To fix an ambiguity, when I said "And while four-wheel-drive helps with acceleration, it doesn't do anything for braking, as these drivers find out by crashing into targets such as other drivers" what I meant was I go slow enough so I can stop in a normal distance. That means I might have to go 25 instead of 45, but on ice, going 45 can be like going 90 (made up numbers, haven't done the math).
(Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:53PM (2 children)
What is this "snow" you speak of.
I live in Florida, dagnabbit. Global warming will drown us all, but what the fuck.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:10PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_in_Florida [wikipedia.org]
It's a thing. A rare thing, but a thing.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:14PM
It's like the stuff you pour the tequila and margarita mix over but LOTS of it all over the place.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:30PM (3 children)
Okay, I'm all for nose to the grindstone but getting rid of snow days, even in SC, is just fucking unamerican.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:56PM (2 children)
How else would you have vacation except by the act of god? You keep grinding until god says you're done!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:19PM (1 child)
IDGAF about god but I'd have rioted if I didn't get a day off when it snowed when I was in school. Well, honestly, I'd have just not done the work. I was really, really good at not doing homework that didn't interest me or that I already groked the lesson of.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:26AM
I'm suuuuuuure you would have.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday August 05 2018, @11:21PM
I am pretty sure global warming will solve this problem for everyone.