God, ETS, eat a dick

On June 6, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

ETS, the company behind these fucking Praxis tests, is one of the worst organizations in the history of the entire fucking planet, and by “organizations” I’m including the Nazis, the KKK, the Republicans, and whatever flavor of Communism might be most on your nerves at the moment. I hate these people to a degree I’m not entirely able to explain, at least not without the FBI taking a closer look at me.

I passed another practice test today, by a larger margin than the first one, and decided, fuck it, I’m going to go ahead and schedule this thing. The last time I looked I was able to schedule an exam the next day, so you can imagine my surprise when I logged in and discovered that I can’t get in before July 1 any longer. Which … fuck. This blog is already turning into the All Math Test All The Time website, and now I have to wait three more weeks? I’m ready now, motherfuckers. Let’s do this.

And then I went through their list of “requirements,” and …

… look, God damn it, I need these fucking testing companies to understand that their shit is not that fucking important. The fucking NSA doesn’t protect their shit as carefully as standardized testing companies do. They won’t let me have scratch paper for a fucking math test. I have to use a fucking whiteboard, which can be “erased in front of the proctor,” because … what? I might share questions with somebody? So the fucking hell what? Every test is fucking different, and you sell practice tests, you stupid dicks. Which is the actual reason, by the way, because extorting $120 out of me for the fucking test isn’t enough; they need more money from anyone who wants to study for these fucking things, like the blood-sucking rent-seeking fucking parasite scumbag shitstained vermin they are.

Make sure any other devices in my home that use the internet aren’t running?

Are you fucking kidding me? I’m not even going to try to do this. Avoid wearing jewelry? Fucking why? And what’s “dressed appropriately” mean? Are people seeking teaching licenses likely to have their dicks or tits out while testing, so likely that they need a rule about it?

Elsewhere, I am told that I am expected to be able to show the proctor “all four walls” in the room I am in, presumably because any wall they can’t see is obviously covered with posters explaining how to do the questions on the test. My webcam is part of the fucking computer, though, and I’m not sure how the fuck they expect me to point the Goddamn monitor at the wall behind it.

(Also, remember: approximately zero percent of teaching involves blind recall of facts in the complete absence of resource materials. If I forget anything I’m supposed to be teaching, I can literally look it up right in front of the fucking kids if I want to. These things should be entirely open notes; what I have memorized is completely irrelevant.)

God, I hate this fucking company.

Well, crap

On June 5, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I can’t get WordPress to load from my desktop for some reason, but it’s working for my phone, so … yeah. God forbid I not post something.

(Site loads on computer)

I’m gonna take another practice test tomorrow. If I had gotten everything right that I either already knew or feel like I nailed down today, I’d have gotten a 55/66, which is a clean and easy pass. The other 11 are calculus problems and hopefully guessing will get me two or three of them. If I do well tomorrow, I’m definitely taking this for real next week.

In which it looks like I can do this

On June 4, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

I ended up having some spare time this afternoon, and I found a free practice test online through the same people that sold me my study guide (so I figure it’s at least reasonably reputable) so I went ahead and took it, and if I’m understanding the scoring methodology correctly … it looks like I passed, although not exactly with flying colors– I got 42/66 questions right, or 63.34%, for a final score of 163, and a 159 is a pass in Indiana. I could have gotten a 39 and still passed, so I had a three-question cushion on my first try.

Now, granted, no one is ever going to look at my Praxis score again after I’ve passed the thing, so it really doesn’t matter if I pass it by the skin of my teeth or by flying colors, but I want a little bit more of a cushion than that. I was able to go through the practice test after taking it, and I printed out two categories of questions: questions I had gotten wrong, and questions that I got right but I know good and well that I got right by being lucky. That gave me about 27-30 questions to study tomorrow; in there are a handful that I absolutely shouldn’t have gotten wrong, including one thing I’ve taught fairly recently (!!!) and one where I just flat-out calculated something incorrectly and didn’t notice it, but I figure being fully confident of over half the test is better than I expected going in. I missed nearly all of the calculus questions, of course, but I got a couple of the trigonometry ones right without guessing and there were one or two of the harder ones where I was guessing between, say, two answers instead of all four and managed to get the right one. I figure I’m going to do this twice more– I’ll study my wrong answers tomorrow and see which ones I can get comfortable with (some are a matter of just not understanding certain kinds of notation, so those will be easy points) and do another practice test on Thursday, then maybe one more over the weekend, and if my numbers move in the right direction I don’t see why I can’t move ahead with the real thing next week sometime. Which, on one hand, will wipe out one of my big plans for June, but on the other hand will let me focus more on Arabic, curricular stuff, and Spanish.

The other thing I need to make sure I understand is the actual rules for taking a Praxis from home. I know they have a proctor monitoring you but I’m not sure what the tech rules are and I suspect on at least two questions I may have broken a rule, depending on how picky they are. This organization has made me incandescently angry with them on multiple occasions so I need to make sure I’m prepared for literally anything. Hopefully things go smoothly, but I need to prepare for them not to.

In which I haven’t failed yet

On June 3, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I was able to successfully get myself up out of bed and showered before 8:30 this morning. I had a cup of coffee and screwed around on my phone for a while, then spent an honest to goodness solid hour studying, and managed to successfully regain at least some of my knowledge of trigonometry in the process. I think what I’m going to do this week is spend the next couple of days filling obvious holes in my knowledge (“obvious” meaning “I remember knowing this, and now I don’t,” as opposed to, say, calculus, which is an entire domain of knowledge that I never really had a grasp of) and then take a practice test on Thursday. (Why Thursday? It’ll take a while, and Friday’s going to be busy. I’ll have time to study but not for an entire practice test.) If I do okay on the practice test, I may go ahead and take a shot at the real test next week and see if I can just knock it out. I only need like a 60% to pass, I think? If I do crap on it, I’ll stick with the original plan and study through June or until I can pass a practice test solidly. I don’t want to have to pay for this thing more than twice, and ideally, only once. I’ve also literally never failed a standardized test so I have some pride on the line here too.

In other news, school is out, and I’m finding that I don’t have a lot to say about that. This was a pretty good year, all told; it had its moments, like they all do, but my honors class was awesome enough to carry through the rest of the year and even my most annoying kids continue to pale in comparison with what I’ve had to deal with at previous schools. That said, I think I’m due for another round of reevaluating classroom procedures; everything I’m doing right now is still very COVID-informed and I’m seeing signs that certain policies may be starting to bite me in the ass a bit. I didn’t really try to reinvent the wheel when I changed districts, but I’m comfortable enough in the new place now that I think I can tweak some things. We’ll see.

I’ll end on a question: certain sectors of American society have been claiming that attempting to impose any sort of penalties or punishments for the obvious criminality of certain individuals was going to cause widespread civil unrest. Locally, I am aware of one (1) house that is now flying a very small (comically so, in fact) American flag outside their house, upside down. Is anyone reading this aware of any civil disobedience or protests literally anywhere other than the tiny little group that’s been outside the courthouse in New York since the trial started? Any downtowns flooded with fash lately? Trucker rebellions? Anything at all?

In which I’m not here

On June 2, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I just got home from a day trip to the northern suburbs of Chicago for my niece’s first birthday party; as my brother is not comfortable with me posting pictures of his children to my blog (which I understand completely, for the record) please allow as a substitute this most excellent picture of his dog Jack that my son took. Jack, you will not be surprised to learn, is a Good Boy.

Take bets in comments on whether I’ll make it through a single day of my big summer plan before it falls apart.