On Feb. 13, Suffolk County Community College canceled in-person classes due to a snow storm, but left it up to professors to decide whether they wanted to continue instruction through online meetings, asynchronous work, or if they wanted to cancel classes and make them up later.
Based on interviews with professors and students, snow days where classes are fully canceled may be a thing of the past.
The option to teach remotely during an unexpected day off from school is a recent development, starting around the time schools had adjusted to teaching during the COVID era. With professors used to the online teaching methods now, some see no reason to cancel classes if they can still teach the materials from home on a snow day, even if it’s done asynchronously.
Danna Prather-Davis, an assistant academic chair of the communications department at the Ammerman campus, chose to teach through Zoom during the day off. “Realistically, the change from a face-to-face situation was not particularly difficult just because of the particular topics I was covering in class [that day],” Prather-Davis said.
Prather-Davis sees teaching online during a snow day as a subject that’s up to the discretion of the professor teaching. “It’s about what the specific content is that you’re covering, not ‘oh do I like asynchronous, do I like Zoom, do I like face-to-face.”
Douglas Howard, the academic chair of the English department, chose to teach asynchronously during the snow day. He cites COVID as a potential reason for the change in snow day expectations, calling it a “side effect of the pandemic.”
Despite choosing to assign work asynchronously during the day off, Howard believes that it won’t fully replace a day off from school just yet.
“On the one hand, the problem would be the access to technology. [Students] may not all have the technology to do the work from home, so that’s the issue that I would see.
While professors get to use their own discretion to decide how to teach, or if they want to teach, on a snow day, students are left waiting on a decision and hoping for their desired outcome.
“I’d rather just have the day off, honestly,” said Gamaeel Vilceus, a 24-year-old liberal arts student. He feels that working on snow days will be the new norm in the future, adding, “I feel like teachers are gonna defer to Zoom. I think the only days they’ll cancel are when they’re sick.”
