When the temperatures are “dangerously cold” and you can’t even open your garage door, a snow day sounds like a pretty doable option. Actually, any day sounds like a good day provided the option of staying home from school.

Stress can pile up in the middle of the year for students of all ages and grades. After a while of going to bed past midnight and then getting up an extra half hour earlier to finish that English assignment, it’s hard to resist the temptation of a day home from school. In a student’s mind, a day at home equals a day to switch their life from fast forward to pause. Then, all the tasks that have been piling up over the past week stand a much better chance of getting done.

Even though snow days sound flawless, there is a catch: making them up. Just about any senior will pipe up and root for a snow day because they don’t have to suffer staying the few extra days into their precious summer vacation time. This consequence usually doesn’t even cross the mind of a freshman that has to wake up at 5:30 A.M. each morning just to catch their 6:30 A.M. bus. The sophomores and the juniors are the ones that think twice before accepting the gift of a day off of school.

Yes, it’s not the most thrilling thing in the world to make up a lost day of school in the beginning of sunny-with-a-high-of-75 June, but one must consider the real consequence of a lost day of school before protesting.

It’s hard for teachers to fit in the material that was originally scheduled for the snow day. For example, teachers last week most likely planned activities or assignments for Wednesday and Thursday, but were forced to compensate the material into all of Friday or part of Monday’s lesson. Then, the material that was originally supposed to be covered on Friday is compensated as well due to the cramming of three days’ worth of work into one. As a student, this doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but when the chapter test comes, the material will likely be more distant and difficult to remember due to the rush. Material is learned best through repetition, and repetition requires time.

If the necessary material is not learned before the unit test is taken, then the material doesn’t stand a chance to be grasped before finals. It’s much harder to relearn the basics of a topic when it has already been expanded upon numerous times. For example, if a student in Algebra I doesn’t understand solving equations, then they will not be able to understand factoring. It doesn’t sound like a snow day can make that much of a difference, but it can. If the basics of a topic are scheduled to be learned on the day of the snow day, and are then crammed into the following day of school, many students will not understand the topic as well as they should.