Snow! It creates a complex series of problems. Yesterday afternoon I left the Houses of Parliament at Westminster in bright sunshine. That persisted through much of the train journey home. But by Derby it was cloudy, by arrival in Sheffield it was drizzling, and by the time I got home - on the hills on the western edge of Sheffield - it was snowing. This morning I awoke to over 10 cm in my garden, with no buses running and roads that would be impassable to my car.
So between 0700 and 0730 I was in contact, either directly or indirectly, with the Head of the Exams team, the person in charge of communications to students, and the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching as we decided that everything was in place for us to let the exams go ahead. Then I set off to walk to work.
That took me an hour and ten minutes, and when I took my hat off on arrival at my office I discovered a 5 centimetre snow covering that had accumulated during my walk.
Decisions about whether to go ahead with teaching during snowy days are generally more complex than decisions about exams. Back-up invigilators can be put on stand-by, but back up lecturers are harder to organise. Something that came home to me a few years ago is that the average journey to the university for students (particularly for first years) is considerably less than for staff. Many students live within 20 minutes' walk of the university, few staff do. And that means that when lectures are cancelled because staff don't get in we can get student complaints. I remember two newly-arrived Finnish exchange students being surprised at lectures being cancelled - saying it would never happen in Finland because a) the public authorities are fantastic at keeping the roads clear, and b) when snow is forecast their university opens dormitories for staff to sleep in. I observed that Sheffield has more hills to deal with than every Finnish city put together.
Communications are clearly important when there is snow around. I have observed that staff living in the Peak District need to get their act together to co-ordinate their stories. One would claim that the road to Sheffield was completely impassable, not knowing that someone else had come in with no problem.
Those who do struggle in, taking several times longer than their normal journey time, do deserve praise. A Head of Department I know once sent out a message to his staff after a guest lecturer had been greeted with a tiny audience on a snowy day: the message complained that people had not made an effort to get in. That message did not go down at all well with those who HAD made such an effort.
Most people I needed to see today made it in to work. But perhaps I stayed too late. When I went out for a bus I found it would only take me part way home and I ended up walking most of the way -so my return journey took me only 5 minutes less than my inbound one: 1 hour and 5 minutes instead of 1 hour 10. So that made a total of two-and-a-quarter hours travelling - as against my usual 25 minutes.
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