Snow days are a rite of passage; children wake to learn or sometimes go to bed knowing) school has been cancelled and in its place is manifested one of the great equations of childhood: snow + no school = joy.
I’m not writing to argue that. When schools (and some decided) started saying last year that with 1-1 technology and virtual meeting capacity down out of the C-suite and in the hands of teachers, there would be no reason to miss school for inclement weather, I balked.
How could school districts consider cancelling one of the great joys of childhood? And why would they? Schools rarely go “over budget” on their allotted snow days, and if they do, it’s handled. But getting rid of snow days? Why eliminate one of the great events and moments of adulthood nostalgia there is? Why do something so cruel as to force a child to sit inside and face a digital device when there’s gorgeous snow and pure fun waiting outside?
To be clear, not every moment of my childhood snow days were non-stop fun. I recall burning fingers from gloves that looked cuter than they worked, the icy crush of face-planting as I scrambled to escape a barrage of snowballs headed my way, and the one time I lay under the ski lift, paralyzed by the awkward position of my skis and my legs and feeling my jeans getting soaked with icy-cold snow and not being able to get up.
But, these moments were in service of a larger goal: joy.
Freedom. Choice. Excitement. Eagerness. Anticipation. Squeals of delight. Peals of laughter. Joy.
Why are those emotions, realities, and joy not part of every child’s day IN school?
I understand sometimes learning is hard, sometimes life is hard, and sometimes when the two are together, things are even harder.
But I’m writing because I can’t help but wonder why our classrooms and schools cannot also be places where the hard moments are in service of the larger goal of joy.
With all the research on happiness, joy, play, and their role not just in mental health but in physical and spiritual health, in the capacity for resilience, in the ability to be optimistic, I cannot think of a reason why there are only a few conversations about the joy of learning. The joy of discovery. The joy of achievement and the joy that comes in the pride of a new capacity being realized.
Because joy requires an abundance mindset instead of the deficit mindset of the system we work with, there are many infrastructural norms and systems we need to contend with (and that should go) to pursue a true and lasting joy in schools and learning. Some of these – grading / ranking students, standardized testing, evaluating teachers in punitive rather than growth-based frameworks – feed on deficits.
An abundance mindset, coupled with a clear mission to cultivate life-long learning for the joy of it would lead to consciously designing learning journeys specifically with joy in mind.
It might never rival the sheer bliss of flying down the hill on a toboggan only to crash in a sibling pileup at the bottom, but, … I can’t help but wonder, how fun could that be?