Well, how about that snowstorm?  Did you enjoy it?  I imagine you did.  Were you glad to return to school today?  Yeah, I see your faces.  Look, I’m not naïve, although I do still kind of hope you are a little glad to be back—or at least that you find some joy in it.

You should know that deciding whether or not to call a snow day can actually be quite difficult.  There’s a lot to consider—the condition of the roads, the safety of carline, the outside temperatures and how they will affect recess or how they could matter in an emergency, where our families are travelling from, the number of school days we’ve already missed, and so on… 

But one of the interesting things I’ve learned about calling snow days over the last week is that an awful lot of the time, schools decide what to do based on one, primary, criterion: Whatever everybody else is doing.  I get it—there is a simplicity in just following the crowd.  And if you’re wrong, then so was everybody else!  At least you don’t look the fool. 

But be careful.  Mark Twain famously said, “[w]henever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” 

Now, that doesn’t mean the majority is always wrong—that we should see what everybody else is doing and then just do the opposite.  But it does mean that in any decision we make, it is fair to ask: Have we taken the “time to pause and reflect”—or did we just follow the crowd?  As John Kenneth Galbraith once said, “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” 

Most schools are still closed today.  We’re not.  We did the painful job of thinking, and decided it was time to get on with teaching you, so that when decision time comes for you, you’ll be ready to do the painful job of thinking, too.

We’re glad to have you back…

Have a wonderful day.