The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I passed my Math test, officially, with exactly the same score I had “unofficially” on July 1st. Delayed fully 40 days for no Goddamn reason at all. Remember, kids, ETS is the devil.
That’s all I’ve got for today, as we have family in town and we will have more family in town tomorrow. Must sleep.
The Supreme Court ruled last week that it was legal to bribe them and today ruled that the President can legally order them killed, so I’m investigating just how the fuck I can get out of this miserable fucking shithole that we’re pretending is a functioning country. I’m going to do the paperwork today to get my passport renewed; my wife and son need theirs for the first time, and I’m going to have to talk my dad into getting his as well.
I think I can apply for German citizenship via descent from German nationals, and it has not escaped my notice that fleeing to Germany to avoid the Nazis is … somewhat ironic.
Anyway, the good news is that I unofficially passed my Praxis test; the score was 182/200, which is a quite comfortable margin. Higher than both of my practice tests, too; I was especially pleased to discover that several of the questions I specifically made sure to review had analogues on the official test, so I absolutely picked up some points during the studying process.
Oh, and in the process of showing off my drivers’ license to my online proctor I discovered that it was expiring in four days, and I went and got it renewed at the DMV in less than 20 minutes this afternoon.
The bad news — because of course there’s more bad news — is that despite the entire test being multiple choice, my official score report won’t be available until August 9, because ETS is the scum of the Earth. There is literally no reason this should take more than a couple of hours. It’s fucking 2024. This means that it’s unlikely that I’ll have the licensure in hand by the time school starts. Will that matter? Maybe, maybe not; the class I’m getting the licensure to teach in the first place hasn’t been confirmed yet, so all of this may have been for nothing. Right now I’m not stressing about it.
Oh, and check this fuckshit out:
Now: those two supplementary monitors are disconnected from the computer, because it won’t let you start the testing software if it detects that you have more than one monitor running. Was that good enough for my proctor? No! I had to point them away from me and cover them with towels. The disconnected monitors, which were not capable of receiving a signal from my computer. I also had to show the camera my glasses and confirm that I wasn’t wearing earrings, because … I guess I might have been wearing Google Glass and had secret spy earrings or some shit.
Don’t miss the whiteboard there; you aren’t allowed to use paper while taking the fucking test. I blatantly violated two of these assholes’ rules; one, I made no attempt whatsoever to disconnect every device in the house other than my computer from the internet, because give me a fucking break, and two, I discovered in the fine print of the rules I was agreeing to in order to take the test the requirement that if I was in a room with a door, that the door must not only be closed (fine) but that the computer I was testing on be placed in such a way that the closed door was visible to the proctor at all times.
Which would require wholesale rearranging of my office, and again, was not a requirement that anyone told me about prior to five minutes before taking the test. I was fully prepared to lie about this one if necessary, and had he given me any bullshit about it, I’d have removed the fucking door from the hinges. Christ, I fucking hate ETS. Like, the Supreme Court ruled today that the President is a king and I still think I hate ETS more than I hate them.
That said, it’s legal for Biden to order Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito executed and Trump sent to Guantanamo Bay now, and I think he should strongly consider it.
Monthly Reads is still coming later today, if (yeah, right) you’re waiting for it.
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.
This was originally supposed to be a post about how technology has made applying for teaching positions in multiple school districts a surprisingly simple and pain-free process; it’s still partially about that, I guess. Have you guys heard of Applitrack? Is that an education-only thing or has it spread to other HR departments in other fields? Long story short: I’ve applied for jobs in four different districts as of this evening. The first application took me forever to get finished because of all the stuff I had to track down and then enter into their system– like, literally, a couple of weeks in three or four sittings– but because all of these schools share the same architecture I can just import my application from one district to another, with only a few specific things that don’t move over or unique stuff for each district that I have to fill out, which means that while it took weeks to get the application for District 1 done, I finished my apps for both District 3 and District 4 tonight.
District Four, though… mang, fuck District Four. District Four wasn’t satisfied with the questions the other districts had, adding a half-hour goddamn multiple choice personality test that they insisted be completed in one sitting, with timed “just give your first reaction!” types of questions where the answer to every single fucking question is going to begin with the words “it depends on…”
I hate hypothetical teaching questions, guys. There are a million billion kajillion factors that go into even the tiniest goddamn decision that I make at my job, and giving me half-assed hypotheticals and making me choose one of four (when the answer could just as easily be “none of the above” or even fuckin’ “all of the above) answers on a ticking 35-second timer is just making me think I probably don’t want to work for your district after all and you can take your damn fishhooks and shove ’em up your ass.
(Don’t worry about it if you don’t get the reference, but you really should have read Hunger Games by now.)
Anyway.
The personality test wasn’t their worst sin, though. One of the other things I have to do with these applications is upload a bunch of files to each of them– a cover letter, a resume, recommendation letters, transcripts, etc. I’ve already pulled down all of these files for the District One application so I’ve got them all in my “Applying for Stuff” folder in my Dropbox and uploading them is a snap. Except these fuckers want my Praxis scores for some goddamn reason.
You have gotta be fucking kidding me. Because ETS, the company that runs the Praxis test, is the scum of the goddamn Earth and I would rather be living in a cardboard box under a bridge next year than have to give them any more of my money. ($40! For my own fucking scores for a test that cost two hundred fucking dollars! And they think it’s okay to make you wait ten fucking business days to email you a digital file. I hate ETS more than any company on Earth, people. They are vermin.)
The other thing? You know I’ve passed these goddamn tests already. How do you know that? I’m a licensed teacher and I actually have a job right now, all of which are impossible without passing Praxis tests. You don’t need my goddamn Praxis scores, assholes. Luckily, I had some shit on paper lying around that I was able to scan, because seriously: I’m not giving these fuckers any more money to release my own scores to me for a fucking extortionate fee, and between wanting that completely-irrelevant-yet-expensive-and-inconvenient document and the bullshit personality test, I think your district has probably already failed the first interview.
Bah.