Comp+essay+test


 * Driving Snow Days**

Nightwatch

Those sleepless nights haunt us watchful dreamers, Children awaiting Mom’s beckon to rest, Paradoxical homework undone drifting Onto the nightstand, a mountain of reproach.

The call that doesn’t crack the gloaming, The plow that doesn’t checker your wall – Still absences mock your having believed The predictions you have heard on TV.

Grace pours not out of a stream on the news Deathwatch, but out of the darkened screen Of cerulean uncertainty. Lightness from darkness, Grace uses gauzy power to pile up joy In surprise unearned, immeasurable but in drifts.

My exhaustive study in snow days, conducted over decades as a teacher and student, has yielded the following facts about this mystical enterprise:

FACT: Snow days are a universal human concern. FACT: Too much talk can affect the weather. FACT: Your teachers are as disappointed as you are. FACT: Timing is everything.

Let’s examine the facts all at once, a blizzard of information through which we must make our way. You __can__ control the weather by being judicious in your talk and industrious in your homework; think back to middle school. Where I teach, the meanest middle school teacher (an oxymoron) takes unnatural delight in scattering knots of seventh grade girls who croon, “It’s gonna dump snow!” A seasoned veteran and talented actress, she knows the cardinal rule: teachers, including the Head, are affected by the buzz about snow. There are contingency assignments to plan so the day is not wasted in sledding and hot chocolate. More important, though, snow days are inherently subversive, so discussing them in public only brings the harrumph of disapproving authority and the likelihood that the Head’s “storm response team” -- weather-watching teachers scattered throughout the state, picked by the Head for their unimpeachable integrity, clear-eyed realism, steely resolve – will err on the side of understatement rather than hyperbole in reporting current conditions to him. Beyond not talking about snow days, remember the law of averages: “Chance favors the prepared mind,” as I learned in seventh grade. Do your homework as the snow flies.

After managing what you can control, look at snow days or their lack thereof as a time to reflect on the human condition, fodder for English class: we are imperfect and fallible, rats in a maze forgotten by the Creator, essentially sinful if not hopeless. Our happiness at this moment rests with someone else whom we don’t know well, an Authority who seeks balance as he or she navigates a blizzard of expectations. A snow day is an expression of grace, what my high school theology teacher used to call “unmerited favor before God.” Getting a snow day may be the closest we come to knowing grace, for its incremental nature leads to its only revealing itself to the watchful seeker. Grace surrounds us – “the world is literally studded with pennies” -- as Annie Dillard tells us in //Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.// If you don’t get a snow day, look to the state of your soul: examine your conscience.

Alternatively, you might think about it from the Head’s position, the person who makes the call to the radio: you’ve got to make the right call. The real-world public is watching the stream on the TV news. If our school is the only one in the state closed, we’re seen as a pampered enclave of sissies. Parents will call demanding pro-rated tuition refunds. If he draws on the Yankee spirit of frosty self-reliance and granite resolve, some chowderhead will be programming a random play of Grateful Dead bootlegs and slide his SUV into a shallow ravine in front of Sudden Pitch; believe me, that’s a trophy no School Head wants. As surely as students will regale each other with fresh tales of fishtails and debate the merits of antilock brakes, faculty will grumble about school being closed in Hopkinton or describe the mythic snow belt in Canterbury. Put simply, the Head’s in a no-win situation: he is sure to disappoint someone in his response to the weather. Imagine the case earlier this year, when he had to tell one of his kids to get up to attend our school while reporting to the other that Concord’s school had a delay, allowing his son to go back to bed. Ouch.

So how can you predict the likelihood of a snow day? It’s a simple formula: seek clandestine strength in numbers and know that timing is everything. The Head relies upon a few stalwart souls to tell him the weather: manipulate the odds. A well-concealed snow blower in Hopkinton or Canterbury, gifts of Roman-numeraled rulers or a digital instrument secretly fashioned in Physics, or an icy crust on a particular back porch may be all it takes. If you must preserve some illusion of science in this meteorology, then know this: timing is everything. Know, finally, that you awaken all night as the snow flies for a reason: the storm must be gathering strength between 4 and 5 a.m. for you to have any hope of blissful self-determination of the day. The sun mocks the Head of School at 9 a.m. on a cancelled school day only once, and dry pavement at 5:00 may have six inches on it at 10:00, but you’ll still be in school. Either way, he will have made the wrong decision. The only right way to make the decision to is incorporate mind, body, and spirit in responding to circumstance: know the parameters, prepare well, and send good vibrations to the decision-makers, barring a manipulative approach. In any event, pray for what we might know as grace, and the grace to accept it.

**-- John Bouton**