On Pace

We've had three snow days already this semester. Three. And yet, somehow, impossibly, we're still on pace.

I know what you're thinking, because I used to think it too. Snow days were panic days. Each one meant recalculating the calendar, cutting a unit short, rushing through trigonometric identities, or dropping that exploration you'd been planning since August. You'd return to find students who'd forgotten formulas, momentum lost, and a schedule now impossibly behind.

But here's what I've learned: that panic only exists when your classroom runs on your voice, not theirs.

In a lecture-based classroom, you are the pace. When you're not there, everything stops. The content lives in your worked examples, your explanations, your carefully timed delivery of procedures. Miss three days and you've lost three days. The math is brutal and unforgiving.

In a discussion-based classroom, though? The students are the pace. And they don't stop thinking mathematically just because it snows.

When we returned after our first snow day, I didn't launch into makeup lectures or compressed content. In precalculus, we picked up right where we left off, using special right triangles for the basics of trigonometry and working with the equations of ellipses. In geometry, we were wrestling with lengths of segments and measures of arcs in circles. And here's the thing: they'd kept thinking about it. They came back, end-of-unit exercises prepared for presentation. And when one-on-one conversations overlapped with the beginning of the next unit, the students ran the daily discussions without me in the room.

That's the flexibility inherent in discussion-based teaching. It's not that disruptions don't matter.  Rather, it's that the work isn't disrupted when the work is sense-making, not just procedure-following. When students are genuinely wrestling with concepts, arguing about whether their approaches are equivalent, testing conjectures in small groups, making connections between representations, they're doing the intellectual heavy lifting whether they're in my classroom or stuck at home.

This semester, we've lost three instructional days to snow. But we haven't lost three days of learning. Because in a discussion-based classroom, I'm not the sole delivery system for content. Instead, I'm the facilitator of mathematical thinking. My students came back from each snow day ready to engage, not because I sent emergency problem sets, but because the questions we're exploring together are genuinely interesting enough to linger in their minds.

We're on pace because the pace isn't mine to keep. It's ours.

And when the next storm rolls through, and it will, I won't be frantically rearranging unit plans. I'll just be curious to see what connections they've noticed, what questions have emerged, what patterns they've been puzzling over while the world was white and quiet.

That's the flexibility a discussion-based classroom offers: not the ability to cover more content faster, but the trust that mathematical thinking continues even when the schedule doesn't.