Growing up in North Carolina where a good snow snowstorm comes once every 3 years, I am no foreigner to the concept of closing school for a 1-foot “blizzard.” In North Carolina, a decent snow could earn us one, maybe two days away from the classroom before the weather would shift and the white fluff would melt back into the red dirt.

Madrid sees snow less often than North Carolina, so the city was not prepared for the deep snow that we received last Friday. Now, a week later, we are still traversing icy streets and sidewalks that haven’t been cleared. The temperatures have hovered around freezing point, hardly allowing the ice to melt before it freezes back into a solid sheet.

Although students were supposed to return to school on Monday, January 11, the school cancelled a few days of class and then moved classes online for the rest of the week. Given the slippery roads, the school has decided to continue virtual learning for another few days (at least). Lord willing, students will finally return to campus on Wednesday, January 20. My teaching assignments this year are elementary library and 9th-grade English. If all goes as planned, I will have my first elementary groups on Wednesday, and I will begin teaching English on Monday, January 25.

In the meantime, I am eating lots of chocolate, enjoying dinners and game nights with other teachers, and re-reading all the stories that I read as a 14-year old so that I can write lesson plans. There are definitely worse ways to spend a snow week!