Every educator I know in my area is dealing with the fallout from last week’s Polar Vortex – specifically, the teaching/rehearsal time lost to it.
One teacher I heard was sending assignments every day via email to his AP students, and started off yesterday (the first day back) with a test! Another colleague made his college music theory test take-home because he couldn’t devote a class period to it. And many rehearsals are picking up in speed and intensity – say, if there are now only 5 rehearsals until Choral Festival instead of ten. My ensembles both rehearse only weekly, so a lost week or a lost day is the same – and it can feel catastrophic to our momentum. But we pick back up and we hurtle ourselves forward.
In short, the Polar Vortex is giving us gifts. It’s a gift to know where the slack in the system is – and be able to pull it taut when we need to. It’s a gift to know that the standard pace isn’t the only pace we possess. It’s a gift to be able to find other solutions and use them to support our mission.
Most important, it’s a gift to know that we can overcome temporal challenges we didn’t expect.