Tues-Wed.

I don't totally understand how Wed is short for Wednesday. Well now. I just went to look that up real quick and found out some answers from someone's blog:

 https://britishisms.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/weds/

Good news! Fantastic news! Great news! The phone was found! I don't know where or how exactly, but I was so happy and relieved. I brought the security lady a flowering plant that we got at Safeway the other night, which seemed to make her happy and that made me feel happy. There was a reason I hadn't planted it yet! It was meant to be a gift for someone special. It was only five bucks too... whereas the cut flowers I got for another teacher awhile back were about thirty dollars! Rip-off...!

So again yesterday I skipped writing in favor of sleep, although I did go to a volunteer fundraising job which took a lot of energy and lasted a few hours. But I also didn't maintain my "no Twitter until I write" rule yesterday or today. That's why I'm still writing this pretty late at night.
I did a little exploring and found out there is a single solo restroom near the staff luncheon room. I was glad I didn't have to do a number two, because I didn't notice until it would have been too late that there was minimal t.p...
The staff room is really nice, but it doesn't have any coffee or tea or snacks like in the mail room at the other school. Speaking of mail rooms, there isn't really one here, it's just envelopes in file folders. I do miss how the leadership program kids at the other school were always doing projects to build people up, like posting motivational notes in the bathrooms and writing thank you notes to the staff and putting them in our mailboxes.
When a student I was working with got back from the bathroom he announced he just took a 'big poo'. I wasn't fazed, but I don't know if he was just sharing that or trying to gross me out, because that is something he might be prone to do. He commented that it's disgusting, I replied it might seem like that but it's just what is left after your body absorbs all the vitamins and nutrients it could use, and it's almost always some shade of brown because that's all the colors of your food mixed together.

A teacher gave out some very basic money math word problems and I was expecting some kids to have difficulty with translating them into mathematic equations, though not to be seriously stumped; they were addition and subtraction solvable. But one student was severely daunted by every problem. The concept of using subtraction to figure out how much money you would have remaining after you spent a certain sum seemed to be beyond his understanding. I tried to explain it in several different ways but without knowing what he already knew and was capable of comprehending, it was hard to assess the best way to instruct him. Money math can be fun and is a great real-life skill to learn, so I hope we can figure this out. It's just frustrating and perplexing to think he got to high school without absorbing any of the basic ideas of when to use subtraction. I thought at first the word problem aspect was the confusing part, or that there are so many ways to say subtraction (minus, take away, difference) but even when I rewrote it in number form he was bewildered. He didn't get that the number indicated after the decimal was the change and the number before the decimal was the dollar amount. Which means he never learned ones, tens and hundreds places in their correct order. So I guess that might be a good place to start!

I was correcting papers in the library and blanked on the spelling of the word exercise. I saw a kid spelling of it with a 'z' and I wrote it like that too. I knew it wasn't right so I went to find a dictionary but I couldn't locate one. I asked the librarian and she looked too, but no. It turns out they don't have any hard copy dictionary books anymore. Huh. Broad City tonight had a great tribute montage to famously powerful and strong activist women, I highly recommend it! Peace out! :)