...Snow Days and Time

I enjoy snow days as much as the next teacher. They provide a sometimes much needed break for the student (and me) in the middle of what can be a long and cold winter's week. This week has been slightly ridiculous. Monday's early dismissal came two hours too late, and had we stayed until the normal end of the school day, the storm would have been nearly over. Tuesday's late start allowed me to get a bit of extra sleep, but forced me to revise project timelines for my students. Today's cancellation was appreciated what with eight inches of snow; however, a two hour delay would have sufficed. Tomorrow's cancellation might be needed (a high of -2 without wind chill), but I feel we might be jumping the gun on this a little. We are supposed to get another round of snow Thursday night into Friday morning, so that puts class on Friday securely in the "questionable" column. That leaves us with about a day and half of instructional time total this week. This raises a couple of questions for me:

1. Since the days we miss during the winter term are made up during the spring term, I lose days from my social psychology classes that are not made up. What aspects of the social psychology cirriculum do I deem as "not as important" to account for the 4 days of school we've missed? Right now, the answer is fairly easy-- I cut the analysis of groupthink and group mentality in Harry Potter. This four day activity can easily been done in one day by talking about The Bay of Pigs and the Iraq War.

It will really become a problem if we have many more snow days (which I fear we will since February has always brought ice storms to our little section of the state.) After I finish this unit, I move onto systems of oppression and discrimination. That will take me nearly to the end of the term. If we have more than two more cancellations, I will have to start thinking "what group of oppressed people do I not cover?" I suppose what I could do is not cover class discrimination in social psychology. Then, I could cover it during social stratification in sociology.

2. Is the trimester system really the most effective way of dealing with scheduling? It seems to me that if we were on the semester system, the snow days we missed would then be made up in the same term. Any thoughts on this?