On Snow Days and MLK

This past week proved to be an interesting one. Despite the holiday on Monday, CA was scheduled to have school, with a day-long celebration on MLK on Tuesday. The forecast for Sunday night was heavy snow, and the campus was buzzing with the hope of a snow day. The sky did indeed look heavy and threatening, but as a teacher, I knew better than to think we'd get the next day off.

I was wrong, however, and when I woke up at 6:30 for my morning workout, I saw that school had happily been canceled. And rightly so, I thought as I looked out my window. Snow was pouring from the sky, and the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was go outside. At 10:00, as I made my way over to the gym, the precipitation had morphed into a nasty freezing rain. There was about a foot of snow on the ground, and whatever had been snowed early that morning was covered in black ice. Very safe. At lunch, we joked that God and MLK had conspired to get us out of school that day, since almost no one else had to work. Perhaps that was the case, but whatever it was, weather or God, I was grateful for the day off. I had been a good girl Sunday night and prepared for class and gotten all my weekend grading done, so I was able to truly do nothing that day. It was glorious!

The next day was fairly fun too. At CA, MLK day is celebrated on Tuesday with a day full of speakers, workshops, and an art show. As a fledgling member of the Community and Equity Team (basically the school's diversity office), I was able to help put together the day's festivities. There were a ton of workshops lead by students and faculty alike, each with some kind of diverse theme. Hip hop, global warming, sexual orientation; everything was discussed. The speaker, Byron Rushing, kicked things off with a powerful talk reminding us that MLK truly believed in equality and non-violence. He did a really good job of reminding us that we were celebrating a man and a movement, and that most people forgot that on MLK day. After the day of workshops, the whole school gathered in the auditorium to watch the entirety of the "I Have A Dream" speech, which I had never seen, and which was also very moving. It was a good day and I think it was good for the kids to really think about those kinds of issues, as opposed to just having the day off to goof around, though they did get Monday off thanks to the snow. All in all, it was a good day, and I am proud to have had a small part in making it happen.