No snow days this year

The city’s public school system used to be notorious for keeping its doors open, even during inclement weather. And on the rare occasions public schools did close, it was a cause for celebration, in addition to playing in the snow and sipping hot chocolate on an unexpected day off.

But that won’t be the case this year. Last spring, remote learning ushered in an era of innovation when it came to teaching children from their homes, and it plans to continue doing so going forward.

On what used to be snow days, public school students will still go to school — remotely. That would normally be the case for schools’ fully remote groups and whichever hybrid groups were learning from home on a given day. But on days with inclement weather, they’ll be joined by that day’s in-person group.

Higher ed stalwart got start at Fieldston

Ohio’s Kenyon College is miles away, but one of its most beloved professor’s roots are right here in this part of the Bronx.

Peter Rutkoff, a professor and founder of the American studies program at Kenyon, has been a fixture there since 1971. And he’s retiring at the end of the academic year, after a decades-long career at the college.

But Rutkoff’s love for learning started much earlier than 1971. First, he was a student at Ethical Culture Fieldston School. It was there he was first exposed to project-based learning, which he carried with him in every teaching job thereafter.

“I came to realize as I got older actually teaching (at Kenyon) that the things I liked to do … are interdisciplinary, that you learn from experience, and you learn by creating things collaboratively and creatively,” Rutkoff told The Kenyon Collegian, the college’s student newspaper.

Rutkoff is best known on campus for “his presence in Wiggin Street Coffee, where he can be found most weekday mornings chatting with Gambier residents in a cluster of leather chairs,” the newspaper added.