They’re Killing Snow Days
Why Your Nervous System Needs Them
Dear Companions,
Reading Erik Hoel’s well-written reflection yesterday on snow days and their importance to children, I commented:
why are snow days so hard-coded in our memories?
In his piece, EH wrote:
Snow’s semiotics is complex. We call it a “blanket of snow” because it is precisely like shaking out a blanket over a bed and letting it fall, and brings the same feelings of freshness and newness. But it can then be trammeled, and once so is irrecoverable. So snow is virginity, and snow is innocence. Snow is the end of seasons and life, but it is also about childhood.
New York has all but eliminated snow days in favor of remote learning. My principal said that our school would only start remote learning for second graders and up (as evidenced by my kindergartener now speaking to me with a puppet flamingo on her hand as I write). But elsewhere, all kindergarteners and Pre-K are doing it.
Mamdani said tens of thousands of students and teachers already logged on in advance of the remote day.
When I mentioned this to EH, he replied: The snow day is archetypal and mythic, you can’t mess with stuff like that.
I can remember practically all my snow days as a kid. The ’90s had a few wonderful winters. Now my own kid’s laughter echoes in the snow.
Are we really ready to take that all away? Forcing children to sit at a computer instead of meeting friends, sledding, and best of all, drinking hot chocolate?
Perhaps we could convince them of the fact that snow days are important to the adults too. You know, neurobiology.
The brain, as you likely know, is a prediction machine. Most days are so well-predicted they barely get encoded at all. Snow days are prediction interrupters. They violate visual and scheduling axioms.
What does that mean?
The experience gets saved more strongly, more vividly, and more lastingly. The hippocampus shows increased activity during novelty or surprise. Dopamine neurons fire more when something is unexpected (Shultz, 1997).
Children live inside a world where weather can create a new reality. Adults live inside a world where even a crisis needs to be justified to the Overlords. But between the two, the brain hasn’t changed.
It still marvels when the sky breaks open and blankets the earth. When the whole world stops so you can see your own breath. When your eyes are met with a different glare, a different hue — a white laid over bare auburn tree branches.
Of course, snow days might be harder for us adults. More responsibilities, more to do. I’m kind of tired. But remember: these disruptions are significant for your nervous system, too.
With much love from the Healingvrse,
Rebecca