I grew up in a climate with no snow. Houston Texas receives about one inch of snow every five years. So, as you can imagine, my first few years living in Utah were filled with constant wonder as the white stuff invariably began to fall each winter. It was magical to me – the beauty as well as the fact that it happened every year, like clockwork.

The one thing I didn’t like about the snow was going to work. I wanted to stay home, make hot chocolate, curl up in front of the fireplace with a book. You know all of those images that a snowy day brings up? I wanted to live them. To make matters even worse, I was teaching second graders. Each and every one of them had their own fantasy of what they wanted to be doing that day – and I seriously doubt that any of those fantasies involved sitting in a classroom for 6 hours with me. I wanted to let them free for the day, give them an all-day recess if you will. Of course, I wasn’t “allowed” to do that – our playground had a schedule which was strictly followed, and besides, our students were there to be taught a specific curriculum, mandated by the state and federal governments. Spending a day outside doing nothing but playing was NOT listed anywhere in the prescribed curriculum.

A few days ago we had our first snowfall of the year for 2003. I woke up late, thinking it was much earlier than it actually was. Walking by a window I literally stopped in my tracks, and said out loud to my 2 year old, “Oh, and it’s snowing outside…” You have to understand that the day before I had been running the air-conditioning in my car while doing errands, because I had mistakenly worn long pants that day. So I was completely shocked by the fluffy white flakes adorning my neighborhood. My son, Gabriel, started up a chant of “No? No?” (meaning snow, not no, although that is a recurring chant in our house as well). So we bundled up, and I took him out to play with all of the “no” that was covering our back yard.

This was Gabriel’s first real encounter with snow, last year he wasn’t walking when the snow came. He was awe-struck by it all. I watched him play for about 30 minutes before we were both too cold to stay out any more. What happened in those 30 minutes was amazing. I watched as Gabriel learned that snow is cold, and that it tastes good. He figured out how to get snow off of his mittens by clapping his hands together. He learned how to make “snowballs” by bunching the snow together. He found out that snow melts on your hands and face, creating water. He soon understood that throwing the snowballs was TONS of fun, and that while it was fun to throw them onto our wooden deck, dropping them onto dirt or snow wasn’t all that exciting. The most satisfying thing was to throw them onto the rocks, where they exploded into many small pieces. And he learned that after awhile, your fingers hurt from the cold.

All of these lessons were absorbed within that 30 minute time frame. Each one was tested and experimented with, and with each experiment I watched as this small person created models of his world, and began to understand how snow and cold work. I didn’t have to tell him that the snow was cold, or explain that harder surfaces would break the snow up more effectively. I never mentioned the effects of gravity, or the fact that snow will stick to itself if you squeeze it together. And yet, as I think back, most of these lessons (temperatures, gravity, states of matter) were in that second grade curriculum from which I was required to teach. And frankly, as interesting as I tried to make things, most of those subjects bored most of my students to death. I couldn’t help but think that if we had been allowed to spend that first snowy day of the year outside, I would have “taught” about a third of my science curriculum for the year in few hours. The best part is, I wouldn’t have been the one doing the teaching – each of those students would have created, experimented with and tested their own models, and in the end would have reached their own conclusions. The lessons learned would have been lessons that would have become a part of each child, a knowing at a level that no textbook could ever teach.

As Gabriel and I piled our boots and coats by the door, I couldn’t help thinking about all of the children sitting in their classrooms in Salt Lake City, looking out the windows and wishing to be outside. It made me a bit sad to think of the lessons they were missing out on, and it really made me wish that Sego Lily School had been up and running that morning, so that I could have experienced our students outside playing in the snow. I could imagine each of their faces, cheeks red from the cold, as they played outside, with no idea how much they were actually learning. But beyond any of that sadness was an excitement about the future, and the opportunity that my children and many others will have to play and learn at Sego Lily School. I look forward to all of the hidden learning that will go on, as well as the more obvious lessons that will be learned. And most of all I look forward to the fact that each of those children will have the chance to learn in their own way, at their own pace, in ways that they will never forget.