Antiproductive Hypomanic Marathon 2026
Seismic cataclysm, off the meds, Epstein, ICE, rock band.
They don’t let me take Adderall anymore so in lieu of medication I have strategies to keep me on the beam. One of them is writing down all of my “open loops”. Grab a blank piece of paper, and write down every single thing you have to do. All time horizons, all levels of importance. It should be easy. I’ll often feel stressed because I have what I think is 5-10 items I’ve been putting off, and then this exercise will reveal that it is more like 40-50 items. The next phase is crucial: bust out some highlighters and categorize these items by urgency. Today, this week, this month, 6 months, this year. I take this further, and rewrite this list on different pieces of paper by urgency. Eventually this reveals that I have maybe only 2 things I need to do today, 3 things this week, etc.
One of those items has been “continue your train of thought on the damn blog”, but it’s been pushed aside while dealing with some career training stuff. Keeping in line with this blog’s true theme, which is not public education, but “what me and the boys are talking about”, I’m going to brain dump some disparate topics to get that item partially off my list. I’ve been insanely busy and this is objectively a waste of time, but you deserve it.
Vignette of the High School Classroom February 2026
It was a classroom full of little “pods” of my 36 students at tables, all working/gaming on their 1-to-1 Chromebooks. A group of students walked in holding some signs that said “ICE OUT” and “I PREFER MY ICE CRUSHED” and asked if they could stash them in my room. I had been directed by my principal the previous day to “play Switzerland” on the topic and to take accurate attendance on the day of a student walk out in protest of ICE’s activity in the US. I didn’t stop them from leaning their posters against the wall behind my desk and told them to be safe.
I turn around to get back to work, and see a student scrolling through what looks like redacted court documents. My suspicions were confirmed when I saw “justice.gov” in the URL bar. I asked him “are your reading the Epstein files right now?”. He replied “Yeah! They’re so messed up.”
Noun Scarcity
I play in a band, and we are releasing our first music soon. This meant of course that we need a name for my band. As much as people like to say “haha, that would make a sick band name”, most of the time it only serves as a momentary chuckle, and would actually make a very stupid band name. I actually think coming up with a band name is one of the least fun parts of being in one. We made a big-ass notes app list of candidates, narrowed them down, picked one, later changed our mind, picked a new one, found out it was taken. On and on and on. The best names are frequently just common nouns and verbs, and those are obviously mostly taken. You can always try to add “The”. Anything more esoteric likely reads as trying too hard, even though it’s more likely to be available. You don’t want to be too funny or too serious. I believe in nominative determinism. Some names will be local forever.
I imagine in the past you had the benefit of only concerning yourself with local competition and nationally known stars. Whoever got more well known claimed the name. Now, in the streaming age, everyone who’s had a band that will exist for 6 months can stake their claim for a band name, eliminating from the pool for years until it’s clear they aren’t active anymore. Hell we might do the same thing. Honestly, if you look at your favorite musical acts name without the sheen of them being your favorite, it’s probably a stupid name that just got famous. Anyway, we are probably calling ourselves “Body Schema”. Stay tuned.
Earthquakes
We recently had a small quake in Utah, just south of Evanston, WY. It was only a 4.7, but a good amount of people along the Wasatch front felt it. This could rattle some windows and wake up the dog, but real damage is rare. It was well coordinated because I was in the middle of teaching about the Wasatch Fault. This region is capable of producing a 7.5 magnitude earthquake, which is about 100 times stronger than the 5.7 we had in 2020. It’s an interesting thing to talk to teenagers about— on the one hand the “big one” would be a serious natural disaster, but on the other it’s such an unpredictable event that serious preparation just doesn’t feel urgent to any of them. Out of the 170 or so students I polled, only about 7-10 of them said their family had some kind of plan for an earthquake of that scale. Some say we are “overdue” for a serious rupture along the front. The last major surface-rupturing earthquake was over 600 years ago near Provo, and statistically one of these occurs along the whole Wasatch Front every 350 years. Current tech is far away from predicting quakes with any specificity.
Anyway, we did a lab where they built skyscrapers out of pasta and candy and tested their durability on a quake simulation table. They had criteria to meet, constraints to honor and a budget. Some fun anecdotes:
One team failed to order sufficient materials and was in a serious panic, unable to build what they blueprinted. Another group offered to sell them their entire building wholesale so they would remain in the running. This allowed the entrepreneurial group to bring their budget WAY down, and shot the unprepared groups budget WAY up.
Highlight team names: “The Gayz”, “Three Fat White Dudes and One Small Girl”.
Two class periods resulted in reality TV level drama, with team members no-showing, plans failing, theft, price gouging and more. The manufactured scarcity that caused this had me feeling like Zimbardo.
This might be the only activity of the year that gets a certain subset of students to get excited about something at school. It always pains me that I can’t realistically keep that type of thing up all year. I heard a couple kids speak for the first time.
Making an App
I’ve been learning a smattering of tech skills over the last year (ML, web development), for fun and for profit. I’m close to a functioning alpha release of a web app for teachers. The problem I was trying to solve is that I theoretically am supposed to keep track of student behavior issues. “Document everything” is they advice I’ve always gotten. The reality is that my attempts at doing this ended up being a mix of post it notes, scraps, abandoned google docs, emails— all of which I never look at again.
This app allows you to upload your roster of students (currently just my SIS: Skyward), and record behavior events for them in plain language. The backend parses these notes into structured data based on severity, category, the necessity of followup etc. The idea is that:
Everything is documented in one place
It’s formatted in a way that allows analysis if needed
You can see your “loose threads” for followups on a dashboard, along with trends etc.
I’m making this for learning purposes, and will likely use it myself, but it’s unclear if this really solves a pain point for the average teacher (most just don’t record stuff like this because its annoying). I can imagine special ed teachers making the most use of this.
If you are a teacher and are interested in testing this, or are a developer interested in working on it, let me know! I’ve been very careful to make sure everything is secure and FERPA compliant. No PII leaves the server and everything is anonymized.