CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Online Classes on Snow Days

NARRATOR: When a winter storm buries a Canadian town, the morning radio announcement that schools are closed has long been a cherished part of childhood. Since the pandemic, however, that tradition faces an unlikely adversary: the laptop. Having shown that lessons can continue remotely, several school boards are now debating whether snow days should simply become online learning days. Advocates argue the technology removes any excuse for lost instruction; skeptics question whether a hastily arranged video lesson amounts to genuine learning.

NARRATOR: Paul Desrosiers, a superintendent in a rural Quebec school board, supports the change. His region routinely loses eight to ten days each winter to storms, and those absences, he argues, pile up, and the damage falls hardest on graduating students heading into their provincial examinations. Teachers in his board now prepare a simple plan in advance, so that when buses are cancelled, classes move online by nine o'clock. Desrosiers concedes that a remote day is not equal to a regular one, but maintains that a modest lesson beats no lesson at all. He also points out that most families already own the necessary devices, many of them handed out by the board itself during the pandemic. Parents, he says, have largely welcomed the plan, and attendance on the first online storm day last January was higher than many teachers had expected.

NARRATOR: Heather Lindqvist, a grade-four teacher and parent in northern Ontario, is considerably less enthusiastic. The very storms that close schools, she observes, tend to bring down the lines that carry electricity and internet to rural homes, which is hardly a promising start for a video lesson. In her own town, several families share a single computer among three or four children, while parents who work in hospitals or drive snowplows cannot sit beside young learners at home. Besides, she adds, few eight-year-olds can stay focused on a screen for more than an hour, however lively the teacher. The result, she warns, is that students who are already struggling fall further behind, while their luckier classmates carry on. Lindqvist also defends the snow day itself as worth preserving: a rare, unplanned pause in an increasingly scheduled childhood.

NARRATOR: Some boards have tried a compromise, requiring online lessons only for high school students, whose independence makes remote learning more realistic. Lindqvist, tellingly, raises no objection; her worries, after all, were always about the youngest learners. Desrosiers, predictably, dismisses it as a half-measure. Still, one suspects that for younger children, the sledding hill will outlast the video call.