For many St. Louis U. High students, an asynchronous snow day can mean a relaxed schedule, extra hours of sleep, and a chance to catch up on overdue assignments or study a little extra for a big test. But for teachers, a snow day can be hectic, stressful, and most importantly, plan altering.

After last week’s winter storms led to snow days on Tuesday and Wednesday, many classes had to delay tests, change homework assignments, or forego their planned assignments in favor of asynchronous learning and accessible homework. 

AP Comparative Government teacher Sarah Becvar’s classes were thrown for a loop due to the timing of snow days last week and the week before.

“It’s not ideal to delay a test too far beyond the end of instruction. As much as possible I want my classes to get the experience of testing in class; I find that to be more meaningful, easy, and beneficial, and it’s also better than converting to online testing, especially since some of my other period classes had already taken it,” said Becvar. “However, teaching AP seniors in the second semester, I feel that at this point my classes are all pretty adaptable and that when they get to the end of the year and take the AP exam, they will be doing similar things in terms of going back and reviewing content that they’ve learned months ago. So I felt comfortable enough to tell the guys to put this on hold and keep going with the material we were learning. I really counted on the flexibility and adaptability of my students, but I think it worked out alright.”

Kathryn Whitaker’s Acting Scenes students lost time to practice their scene assessment in-person and on the stage.

“I would’ve definitely spent more time staging the scene work, but at some point you have to move forward, and that’s the thing, if you don’t get to the work consistently, students start losing the memorization, unless they are going to be really disciplined about it. And when you have four or five days off in a row, how disciplined are they going to be about it?,” Whitaker laughed. “I always love a chance to be at home and read, but I started to get worried after the second day that we were going to stay caught up and stay on top of things. When you start worrying so much, that starts to take the beauty and ease out of those snow days.” 

Other art classes, however, found that the asynchronous learning allowed for some extra time for students to practice, learn, and prepare on their own schedule.

“It depends on the class, but for a class like Varsity Choir, the asynchronous days are very nice because instead of having a full-scale rehearsal with everyone in the room, it gives my students the whole period to practice on their own time and on their own sections,” said choir teacher Addie Akin. “It allows them to look at a section that they’re struggling with personally, and these asynchronous days let them fix and rehearse it. It also allows me to teach things that we normally don’t have time for inside the classroom, such as music theory and note reading skills, since we are always trying to sing when we are in person.”

Outside of the classroom and normal school day, activities were also affected, as meetings had to be switched to Zoom.

“The snow days were definitely disruptive,” said tutor and remote learning assistant Dave Linhares. “I usually sit in and supervise classes while the teachers are teaching remotely, so since students were virtual I didn’t have to come in, which was nice as it allowed me some time to work on and catch up with graduate school classes. I also help tutor kids after school, and for them there was some confusion there, since students are so used to meeting in class and not having Zoom classes, that a lot of them missed their zoom meeting with me for their scheduled time. It was a bit of a wild ride.”

Perhaps one of the most pressing events that was missed and altered due to the snow days was the annual Ash Wednesday Mass. While Fr. Joseph Hill, S.J. did offer a smaller, more personal Ash Wednesday Mass in the chapel for the adults that were in the building that day, the large-scale, all-school Mass was pushed to a later date.

“We canceled the morning Masses on snow days, and of course, we canceled the Ash Wednesday Mass as well,” said Hill. “We thought about moving it to Thursday, but with so many changes to the schedule and how that would have caused more challenges for teachers to have a special schedule day after not seeing their students for almost a week, we decided to move the Mass to another time during Lent.”

The rescheduled mass is expected to take place on campus on March 29 after spring break.