It's Snow Big Deal

We got the word a little while ago that Baltimore City Schools are closed for tomorrow. I guess because they still haven't gotten all of the roads completely cleared yet. I know a lot of sidewalks are still invisible, which means that kids would be walking in the streets to get to school. So despite our not getting more snow today (as was predicted), keeping school closed for a day isn't too crazy an idea.

Someone told me that a couple of years before I came here, it was very hard to get a snow day around here. New York City schools can be that way, but most of the kids in NYC are taking mass transit to school rather than yellow buses. And the streets are cleared quickly just because of sheer volume using them. But Baltimore has buses, and a lot of walkers. The mass transit kids are usually high schoolers. This policy (according to this person) changed when a couple of kids got hit by cars sliding on the ice. So BCPSS is a little more willing to let the snow day thing happen.

The other benefit is that my other school was scheduled to go through the self-monitoring thing tomorrow. Since it has to be scheduled weeks in advance, doing it at all during this quarter has become pretty much impossible. I look upon self-monitoring as a kind of necessary evil, but the thing is, I've been through it once, and whatever mistakes were made in School #1 are likely to crop up in School #2 also. I don't need to be beaten about the head with them again. Better to put School #2 through it at the end of third quarter and they'll see what a good school we are at that point, and re-do School #1 (as we've already been told will happen, but it has nothing to do with how we did last week) to demonstrate actual improvement. Hey, it could happen.

Elsewhere in the world, I bet that the death of Rose Mary Woods is totally overshadowed by that of Johnny Carson. It's a media conspiracy, I tells ya.

For those who don't know, Ms. Woods was Richard Nixon's secretary during Watergate. She was the one who might have erased the crucial 18-minute segment of tape that addressed what Nixon knew and when he knew about the breakin. They know for sure that she created a five-minute tape gap, but I'm pretty sure she was cleared of any malicious wrongdoing. You have to give her credit, though: from the day she left Nixon's employ until the day she died, she kept quiet about him. And here's a bit of heresy for you: Nixon wasn't that bad a president, really. He was fabulous with the foreign policy, not so great domestically and that hurt him. That, and his weird-ass paranoia that led to the whole Watergate thing.