Anyone Can Whistle

Friday, September 5, 2025

We went to see a Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle in Minneapolis. Just for the record, I can’t whistle. Benjamin can’t whistle. Keith and Alexander are very good whistlers. The show was presented as a concert – but there were costumes and props and a narrator to fill us in on what would have been happening on stage (as well as some historic notes about the 1964 premier). It was really cool. It was at a church downtown that has a theater(!). Of course, we immediately said, “Metro Brass could play here.”

Today was my first day back at work. It was absolutely a marvelous day – I had such fun meeting the new sixth graders. There were a couple of big snafus, though. It was safety day – every class every hour presented a different part of safety. Second hour was all about drills – fire, tornado, tsunami (okay, it was listed – get to high ground! – and we talked about the unlikelihood just for fun), as well as the five different kind of lock downs we might do. We talked about a fire drill. Everything seemed very organized and we were ready when the drill happened. Until we weren’t. I had 31 kids when we left the room and 23 when I got outside.

Darn.

Um.

My class was the one that kept the entire school outside while 4 regular staff members attempted to find the 8 kids that just wandered away and were chatting with other classes. Hellllooooo sixth graders. It might be your first middle school drill but it not your first fire drill. Do better.

The next hour I realized I had made a big mistake first and second hour. It seemed that I had just skipped the actual math part of the day.

Ooooo. Not good. It made sense how it happened. They have new SMART boards and someone came before school to show me how to use them. It turned out there were TWO slide presentations for the day – one everyone had about safety – and one about doing a pretest. Yeah, I only read the message about the safety one. The information was there, but I just didn’t see it.

Darn.

The other sixth grade math teacher told me it was no big deal (yes, yes it was). I will say I had a great time playing games with first and second hours after we finished safety. Also, after failing the fire drill and having to deal with that, there wasn’t a lot of time left. Oh well.

The last three hours we did the pretest (DO NOT PANIC. IT IS A PRETEST!! IT DOESN’T COUNT. YOU CAN TURN IT IN BLANK AND THAT IS FINE) and they were panicking. It was pretty nice to see how seriously they were taking their work – but I did get them off the ledge and calmed down.

End of the day we had a lock down drill. Lights out, on the floor, silent.

Mmmm. Have you ever thought about 34 eleven-year-olds being silent? Yeah, me, too. But surprise of surprises, they were amazing!! I had one continual whisperer (the kid that told me that last year having his class be silent would have been impossible. I learned that yes, that was probably true because of HIM) and one kid giggled once. That was it. Everyone else was silent for five minutes. Wooo! What a win.

I get to go back next Friday (unless the oh-I-didn’t-do-the-math thing really comes out badly) and I am already looking forward to it.