When snow started falling in the middle of February, traffic and classes ground to a halt. Cars and courses started again, but with midterms around the corner, professors are finding their own ways to accommodate this semester’s unpredictable schedule.

Joe Weber, professor of geography, teaches a cultural geography class that meets once a week. When snow hit on a Tuesday night, he lost one of 12 lectures.

“When you lose one day, you’ve lost an entire week,” he said. “Making adjustments … really is about the only way to deal with it.”

(See also “Snow, ice shut down Alabama“)

Weber said he builds a catch-up day into the schedule to provide slack, but he still moved his midterm back a week to keep the amount of material covered in each of his exams equal.

“The semester was interrupted, and you have to spend more time getting into the swing of things. It’s difficult for teachers, too, when your class is interrupted,” Weber said. “Pushing the midterm back kind of helps all of us get back onto our regular schedule and rhythm.”

In another class that he teaches on Wednesday evenings, Weber said he lost two class meetings and has had to combine two lectures to compensate. Weber said the past four or five years have had hectic semesters punctuated with natural disaster and once, a national championship.

The University as a whole has learned to consider possible interruptions to a normally scheduled semester. Philip Beidler, a professor of English, said UA President Judy Bonner and Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Olin have been proactive in asking instructors for emergency or contingency plans.

“Those kinds of preparations are made not at the individual class or the department level but at the college or at the university level,” Beidler said.

Beidler opted not to move his midterm but did combine and trim his lectures to accommodate the missing class time.

(See also “University protocols need reevaluation after snow“)

“You no longer have the time to present what you already thought were the main points,” Beidler said. “When you’re doing American Lit from 1865 until 2015, you’ve got to figure out what the important material is. So, when you have a cancellation or an act of God like this, you just do it again. You look at your materials and see what you really think you ought to present and cut away.”

Though Beidler has to shuffle around lectures, the discussion sections of his course were not affected by inclement weather. He decided not to alter the required reading schedules for that portion of the course.

“We were doing so much rescheduling as far as lectures were concerned, that we basically just said enough is enough,” he said.

Ultimately, Beidler said he is not concerned that this semester’s students will have any worse of an experience or education – or even that this semester will be different than his last.

Other instructors have taken more creative approaches to compensating for the changes. Mary Caitlyn Wilhite, a freshman majoring in pre-med, had an instructor who replaced a class meeting with a live Tegrity lecture because he was unsure whether the class would be able to meet.

“I thought he handled it [in] an impressively unconventional way,” Wilhite said. “Another one of my classes really struggled with poor communication, so I really appreciate the extra effort put forth by that teacher.”

(See also “UA cancels classes on case-by-case basis“)