The latest I've heard is that for the remainder of the school year we will get an automated phone call at 5AM if there is going to be school on a given day. I love cold weather. I could absolutely live in the Adirondacks (where BTW there is a 0% chance this storm would cancel or even delay school), but for Philadelphia, this is getting to be a little much of so-called winter.
This has been a very peculiar school year. It's a credit to the stubbornness and downright stickiness of the education system that there's still school at this point. Any rational outfit would have packed up and left town weeks ago. And yet in we go, trying to get what we call "done." In most cases, in reality, 'done' refers to as much as you complete during the school year. There are some instances where you actually need to get through a prescribed curriculum, AP classes in particular. But most of the time, nobody's really going to notice if the students don't know the difference between the Factor Theorem and Remainder Theorem, or if they're not totally fluent in how to find rational roots.
This is a hard thing to impress up on people, and not just in math. We're trying to help the students develop a skill set, a problem-solving toolbox of sort. Almost everything we teach is a means, not an end, and it should be valued in the context of how its contributes to the student's future success. I have no interest in teaching things that are of no use, tools without a job. Almost everything we do in math beyond arithmetic is like that, so it's important to understand that the most important thing the students can learn in our classes is to solve problems on their own.
More on this later.
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