Alternative methods of instruction days on snow days to minimize disruptions. AMI days count as school days, even though they happen at home.
Some teachers appreciate the opportunity AMI days bring. Advanced Placement Language and Composition teacher Briana Ashby said AMI days can offer students a break.
“It is a nice system that we have AMI days because I did not like the system of just tacking days on to the end of the year,” Ashby said. “At that point, we’re so checked out, it felt pretty wasted. With AMI days, we don’t have to add those on at the end but we still get these days off.”
Ashby said it is important that students get to take a break on snow days.
“It’s important that students still get to appreciate a snow day and have that as a perk,” Ashby said. “I assign very little and it tends to be something of the more creative nature so that then [students] can still enjoy the day.”
While students get a break from their normal workload on AMI days, there are also benefits for teachers.
“I do love that we don’t have to make up school days or snow days anymore,” Nixa High School Virtual Counselor, Randi Hunt said. “It helps teachers … be able to keep up with content and keep going and not have to [have] everything come to a complete stop.”
The success of AMI days may rely on how students approach them.
“It could impact them negatively or positively,” senior Allena Crites said. “If you decide to just take the entire day off and not do any work whatsoever, that could be negative. It can be positive if you do decide to do your work like it’s just [a] regular school day.”
According to the Institute of Education Sciences in 2020, 45 percent of schools reported having a computer for each student, with that number increasing each year. Because of AMI days and online school systems like Canvas, the Nixa School District is relying more on technology than in previous years.
Ashby said technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to take away the originality of teaching.
“[Technology] takes away a little bit of [teachers] creativity,” Ashby said. “AI throws an interesting wrench into … teaching. I get emails constantly from different organizations and even from fellow teachers I work with about how we can use AI to grade things or create lesson plans. That to me is taking away the craftsmanship of being a teacher. I value that my fingerprints are all over the things that I do in my classroom. … We want to keep the humanity within teaching and it saddens me to see fellow teachers working against that.”
AMI Days
The Nixa school district use AMI days in order to ensure that inclement weather days don’t have to be made up at the end of the school year.
