By Jake Cohen ’14, Commentary Editor

Who doesn’t love snow? The light fluffy form of H₂O that glistens when the sun touches it, and falls silently day and night. It is the stuff that keeps us home on random weekdays, and the stuff we play in until we cannot feel our toes anymore. Indeed, there are few feelings like the utter peace and serenity of a day when the snow is falling in silence. But is winter all its cracked up to be?

With short days, bitter cold, and schedules that just can’t seem to stay on track, winter is a rough time for everyone. Winter athletes know the feeling of waking up and driving to school in the dark, and coming home after five pm wondering if the sun was ever shining over the long day at school. Anu Sharma ’15 notes: “I personally love the snow, and snow days are great in moderation, but it comes to the point where it is all too much.” While winter often brings unexpected and welcomed breaks from school, often its other effects can do much more harm than good.

Senior Will Delaney has seen his fair share of snow days and winter weather, and he has “generally found that the snow days themselves are not too harmful to a productive education.” What gets Will down more than anything else is the fact that he’s “forgotten what grass looks like.” Will and many other students have been brought down by what Anu described as “weeks where the average temperature was five degrees.” While snow is fun to play with, and many believe that cold beats hot any day, the darkness and constant cold of this winter in particular have many looking forward to spring. Maybe Will can remember what grass looks like again soon.

Whatever one’s attitude towards snow, and snow days, in northern New Jersey these are a reality of winter. In compensating for the missed school, the Academy has instituted distance-learning days. In their infancy, the real question surrounding them is if students get any learning accomplished, or do teachers simply find a way to keep them occupied? While these answers may come with more experience using the Canvas distance learning system, it is clear that nothing can truly replace the quality of face-to-face teaching that is disrupted by snow days. While the winter weather and the cold brought on by the polar vortex may not exactly be uplifting, and the interrupted school days are becoming “too much,” students should focus on the positives. Winter weather is often the “grind” in terms of school days, as there are very few pauses between the relief of December vacation and the sweetness of the two-week March break. If students can use the lousy weather outside to focus more on their own studies and getting grades up before the days get longer, then not only can the winter be made bearable, it can also be used as strong part of the school year.