When you came into the building in the morning, you would sit in the bleachers in the gym until about seven minutes before the first class. Normally it was just a time where you'd catch up on homework or say hello to friends. Kind of, you chitchat a little bit as long as you weren't, you know, being disruptive. But one day, with everybody sitting in the bleachers in sections, there were some kids in one section of the gym that for some reason or another just started throwing pennies onto the floor. Which, okay, looking at it with an adult's eye, was something that shouldn't have been allowed. But things went back and forth with this group of students and one of the teachers who was on duty that day to supervise things, I remember her last name being [teacher name], Ms [teacher name] was trying to get some of these students to stop. Then things got heated. And they started yelling at Ms [teacher name]. Then there was a response, because they wouldn't stop cutting up, that everybody was to be held back when the bell would normally dismiss us to go to our locker and get out to first period class. So we were in this tense freeze for two or three minutes. Then people relented, we were released, we got to class, but the rumor mill had started. And it's not impossible that something was said that may have been offensive to one party or the other. But the rumor mill had gone through, and then all of a sudden by fifth or sixth period that day, the word had spread that there was going to be a walkout at the end of sixth period class going into seventh. And again, I'm never gonna truly know what was said that sparked it, who started it, because the main students that were involved in the original altercation, they weren't in my circle. We were a big enough school that you had circles, and different socioeconomic classes, different academic classes. Even, you know, three or four elementary schools feeding into our junior high. So being what it is, people just start milling around at the main hallway. Which, given the design of the school being mostly ‘50s construction, you just had a mass of people in one area and then the administrators trying to maintain order and remind…

So, I went to this new cafe that I've never been to before. It's like a new cafe. And it was really nice inside, and I was like, "Hey, this place is nice and cozy." And they had a list, they had a menu, you know, on the wall. And there was a list of lattes, and they all had cute little names. And I decided I wanted to get the one called the Buddha. And so I said to the barista, "I would like a small Buddha." And I saw her type it. She took a really long time. She's like typing a lot of things in, and she finally typed in my order and it popped up on the screen. And it said, "Green Buddha." And I was, like Green Buddha? I didn't say that. So I looked at the menu again and way off to the other side of the menu there was a thing that says matcha, and one of the things you could get was the Green Buddha, and it had matcha in it. And I said "No, no, sorry I didn't want the Green Buddha. I just want the regular Buddha." And then she was like, "Oh." And I was like "Yeah, I don't want -- I don't want any matcha," and she's like, "Oh." And so, then she starts typing in some more stuff, and I see it change from Green Buddha to regular Buddha. So I thought she understood what I meant. So I paid for it.  And then she hands it to me, and it's matcha! And I'm like, "I'm sorry. I, I said I didn't want matcha," and she's like, "Well, you said you wanted the Buddha." And I'm like, "Yeah, but you typed in Green Buddha, which is the matcha, and I said no, and then you changed it to the regular Buddha, and that's what I got." And I said that, and she was like, "Well, the Buddha has matcha in it." I'm like, "No, look at the menu. It's listed under lattes. It's a latte." And she's like, "Well, that's what it is." I was like, "But it doesn't say it has matcha in it! It's listed under lattes, which in my definition is espresso. Like it's made with espresso, not with matcha." And she was like, "Well, um, the Buddha has matcha in it." And I'm…

One of my new, newest students lost her brother in a car wreck on Friday night and that was really, really difficult. I have not seen my student, but his girlfriend also went to our school. He had graduated last year, but his girlfriend went there and she always sat at our, at our table with us and she was kind of a, very much a friend and ally of our, of our program, was pretty involved with a lot of the kids, knew a lot of the kids, and she had been a link previously. So this morning they gathered our students at our program to let them know, ‘cause this happened Friday evening, so we hadn't seen our students yet. And we gathered them, the two rooms full of kids and so that we could tell them about -- that their friend had lost her brother, and so that they were aware of it. And some of them might know -- and they definitely knew his girlfriend, and so that they knew that people would be sad. And when she came back to school, she would be sad. And, and just so they were able to process that a little bit.  But when they did it -- and our kids are cognitively impaired at different levels. They said that he, that he passed away. And there was some confusion with some of the kids and I -- they as- -- they were, wanted me to read the paper before they read it out loud, and I should have done it, 'cause I would have caught that. Instead of saying that he died. So they were very confused, like some people weren't really sure what that exactly meant. And people don't want to say the word ‘died.’ So, it's just kind of -- it makes us feel better to say ‘passed away,’ but little kids, and I suspect the same is true with a cognitive impairment, if you're not clear, it leaves you a little bit confused. That you use those euphemisms and in your, and in your mind, you don't really know what they mean, and it can be very confusing. It sounds like they just went somewhere. Which is, again, it's a way to make us feel better, but it's not, it's not really an accurate way of saying it and it leads to a lot of…

I went to a small Catholic middle school, and they were very strict on the dress code. Like green polos, pants if you were a guy, skirts if you were a girl. Skirt length had to be a certain distance from the floor. They would actually have the teachers measure this with a ruler in homeroom, which was so annoying. Knee-high socks. Like black shoes. But here's the thing, it’s like, girls were technically allowed to wear pants, right? Just none of them did. Like the one girl who wore pants, she was like basically one of the guys, if you know what I mean. But the boys thought that this was unfair and some of the girls were like, "Yeah, this is unfair," too. That if girls can wear pants, guys should be able to wear skirts. So I remember it was my eighth grade year, and me and this one other girl, we decided to bring a bunch of skirts to the school for the guys, because it was funny and it was like our eighth grade prank. Yeah, the teachers like did not tolerate this at all, and basically all of the boys that did it got detention. However, they didn't rat out the girls who provided them skirts. So that's really all you can ask for.