Blizzard Bag

I was talking to our oldest child Matthew last night and he told me about a project his school is doing to help students stay up with school work during this bad weather.  He said they were doing "Blizzard Bag," and I said what?  How do you spell that?  Blizzard Bag, an assignment a student does when they are out of school for bad weather.  School bag in a blizzard, I guess is what they mean.  Ohio law allows for 3 such days this year and their school board approved the program in time to activate it.

Governor Kasich is asking the legislature for 4 more days on top of the normal 5 calamity days allowed for Ohio schools.  These are usually snow days or water main breaks or electrical outages.  Do test scores go down with more missed days?  Research says no, it's when half the students are absent when the disparities in scores appear.

I looked at Matt's assignments and saw the apple didn't fall far from the tree.  If you read the links, his writing reminds me of mine, 40 years ago and even less than that.  When I used these kinds of assignments along with a strong hand's on lab experience, it seemed the students learned more.  Still the Supervised Agricultural Experience is one thing FFA has that few other groups do.

"SAE" is labor intensive for the instructor and parents, but leaves students with real world work experience.  The feeder pig and garden projects were two of the most popular among my students because most of them did not live on an active farm.

The SAE is performed beyond classroom hours so if Matt can motivate his students to work on their school work and SAE when they are not in class, they will learn more and perform better.

Better than video games, right?

Ed Winkle