Thursday, January 29, 2026
I was inexplicably not tired today. Three days of doing nothing must fill up the reserves. I woke up a couple minutes before my 6am alarm and everything. Keith was already awake. It was weird. It felt good to be at work – normal. Unfortunately, I had jerky kids all day long. It was 7th grade social studies and they had a “work day”, which to them meant be as loud as possible, refuse to listen to me at all, walk around the room and lie about why they were doing that, lie about being done with the assignments, roll their eyes at me, play Super Mario and try to convince me it was they always do in this class, and generally be jerks. All of them. All day. Nope! I lied! (I must be an 8th grader) There was a kid named Alex who was terrific. Did all the work, then did other homework. Everything he had out on his table looked beautiful. Good job, Alex. You are winning 8th grade. (There were conferences tonight. I told Maren I should have done conferences for that teacher – here are my impressions of your child after spending one hour with them. Bwahahaha)
Tonight, we went to see Whoosh! at the History Theatre. It was…um…it…I don’t know. It was a one man show and that guy was great. The show was over two hours, and he had to remember all of it and he did a terrific job. Unfortunately, the show itself wasn’t very good. It had a lot of cool ideas that they didn’t quite fit together very well. They tried an idea of an incomplete narrator to start, then adding more and more to the stories with “aha” moments. It ended up with a lot of repetition and confusion. Stories don’t have to be chronological, but this web of telling and retelling and going around and around was kind of a mess. It also had some musical accompaniment that was a train wreck. The playing of instruments was terrific. The singing was awful and the songs were atrocious. There were some cool set pieces and some good information about MN history, but I can’t really recommend the show. Sorry, Whoosh!