Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail . . . .

. . . shall keep a teacher from going to school. Oh, add sickness in there, too. The main reason of course is that we are so dedicated . . . . No! Wait! It's those darned sub plans! There aren't too many jobs in the world that require you to make detailed plans of what to do every minute and to leave emergency folders, seating charts, rules and regs, passwords, and also call in at the correct window of opportunity and then hope they get someone who can carry out the plan. I believe there would be a lot fewer missed days of work if everyone had to do this. At most jobs, your work probably just piles up and doesn't get done while you are gone.

And the trick is to find meaningful things for the students to do (so that some learning actually continues) as well as make it easy enough for a sub (who probably isn't an experienced English teacher) to carry it out. And you can't show movies all the time, either.

Speaking of weather, which is why I got to this subject in the first place . . . it's a really big deal in a school if weather causes school to start late, get out early, or be cancelled. Grown people (teachers) pray for snow! This is absolutely true!

Today, our school here in Sicily let everyone go home at noon because of torrential rains and flooding of roads. It was so dark and foggy by the time I got home, you wouldn't even know it was mid-day. It was caused by warm air from Africa, which made the sky yellow (with sand from the Sahara) and the rain "muddy." But it was raining SO hard, I felt as though I had driven through a super-strong carwash for an hour.

In Germany, we rarely got out . . . just once or twice for a little snow or ice or freezing rain. But in Illinois . . . now there's a state with WEATHER! Tornadoes! Electrical storms! Ice storms! Fifty degrees below zero! Snow up the wazoo! And blowing snow! It was that last one that really caused problems, because it both drifted and froze on the road as cars passed over it. There were times when I didn't think I would get home! Once we were snowed in for three days! I think that was 1980. One thing that amused me there was that is wasn't the principal, or the superintendent, or the school board who made the decision about school closing--it was the owner of the bus company! He had ALL the power!

But the only time I really sweated the weather because I almost had to spend the night at school with students was right here in Sicily a couple of years ago. The whole story is on my other blog here: "A Teacher's Worst Nightmare." Today's rain is almost as bad.