Snow Days and the Fight Club Equation

(La version francaise est ICI)


When I looked out the window last week, I saw something magnificent: Snow! Ok, it wasn’t everywhere on the ground and only in the many tall mountains surrounding Urasa but still, this is visible snow in October. Even for Quebec City, it’s a rare occurrence.

First snow of the season

Of course, with it came the cold. Last week as been surprisingly chilly compared to all my previous experience with Japanese weather (it will actually be my first winter in Japan).  I’m not too worried about the cold though since Quebec’s coldness can probably only be matched by Siberia and Antarctica.

Seeing snow in October reminded me of a time, back when I was in high school, when they actually closed our school on the 31^st of October because of snow falls. They very rarely ended up closing the school, so this was a very exciting moment. What student doesn’t like a snow day!

Sometimes, I wondered why we didn’t get more of them. Actually, teachers like them too! Sometimes it can be a bit annoying when an important test is due soon and you are not done preparing the students for it or if you worked very hard on a lesson plan and that day was the only time when you could teach it. But most of the time, any teacher won’t complain about a snow day.

I can’t tell for sure, but I would think that school principals don’t mind them either. An extra day off from all the crazy stuff they have to deal with is probably welcomed once or twice a year.

So I still want to know why we didn’t get more snow days!

Maybe the weather itself is one of the reasons. Actual snowstorms that make transports and walking outside really dangerous just don’t happen that often. But still, there were some days where I felt like it would be easy to justify closing the school. As a matter of fact, on these days, there were often half of the class missing because the parents decided not to send their kids to school. Of course, my mom would not be one of those parents; if the school was open, I was going. That’s it.

The cities’ readiness to deal with snowstorms is a big factor in deciding if the school closes or not. In Quebec, most of the main roads would be kept in pretty good shape even in very bad weather conditions. But in Victoria… ah! …Well, to be fair, I think I saw snow only 3 times during the 4 years that I lived there. But it was still kind of funny to see the whole city shut down after a 3 centimetres snowfall.

Ultimately, it’s apparently the school bus companies that have the final word on whether they will offer service on a given day or not. If they choose not to operate on a specific day, the schools would be pretty silly to stay open for only the students who can walk to it.

So how do the bus companies actually decide to operate or not? I’m kind of picturing the guy in his office doing actuarial calculations to see what are the probabilities for a bus to crash and how much it would cost them in lawsuits versus how much money they would lose by not working on that day… kind of like in Fight Club when Edward Norton explains what his job consists of. (I hope everyone as seen Fight Club at least once!)

But do the bus companies really loose any money when there is a snow day? If not, we should really get way more snow days!

If I put my juvenile wishes aside. I do understand that it would be a bit irresponsible to call snow days every time there is a snowfall. Especially since the people that are most affected are probably the parents. If their kids can’t go to school, what are they supposed to do with them? These parents need to go to work and the kids are not all old enough to stay home by themselves all day.

That being said, it might be a good excuse for these parents to take a day off from work and spend quality time with their kids… I think many families really need that.