Whew!

I can check a few more things off my giant Excel ‘To Do’ list. I observed two classes at my sister’s old high school yesterday. The teacher was a really nice, very earnest guy in a navy sport coat and khakis, maybe 30, teaching juniors about the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. I felt older than I did the last time I was in a high school classroom (as a teacher, two years ago), which was reassuring, but also a little depressing. (I never thought I’d be one of those people who freaks out about getting old, but 25 is less than a month away and I’m not sure I’ve made peace with the quarter-century landmark.)

I also got my content knowledge/multiple choice Praxis score online. I had to get a combined score (two tests) of 320. Perfect score on each is 200. So I needed about a 160 on each, assuming I did about the same on both. I felt good about the free response test (make up a lesson plan, write essay questions, etc.) The multiple choice test? Not so much. It was 130 questions on a little bit of everything: Pavlov and his dogs, the Missouri Compromise, the Silk Road, demand curves, the electoral college. I knew maybe a third of the questions for sure, made decent guesses for another third, and then did eeny-meeny-miney-mo for the rest. If I didn’t get the minimum score, I was going to have to take the test again in Charlotte after Teach for America ‘Induction’ week in June, which was going to put a serious kink in my plan for a leisurely three-day drive to Mississippi seeing friends and relaxing at the Whiting’s lake house. But…the multiple choice scores were up today and I got a 187. Whew. Thing is though, even though that’s a good score, I’m thinking to myself, um, I don’t really know THAT much about history. Or any other social studies topic, for that matter. I have a pretty decent smattering of general knowledge, but there’s no way I could, right now, walk into a classroom and lecture knowledgeably on anything in particular. I know schools feel the need for some standardized measure of what potential teachers know, but as far as I can tell, all the Praxis content knowledge test measured was whether I watched a lot of PBS growing up and spent a week reviewing the Civil War. So, I guess it’s a good thing I did both.

High school, here I come (again!).