I want to read tonight, so this isn’t going to be long, but I figured it was probably worth it to point out that today was a genuinely good day, for the most part, and the first day at least of the study guide seemed to go over pretty well. I have no doubt that as some routine sets in things will get a little rougher– four days in a row of taking notes, even in guided and somewhat abbreviated form, is gonna get on the kids’ nerves– but today at least went well, so I’ll take it.
Just discovered that the wind chill is supposed to be eight below tomorrow morning, too, so watch us get a two-hour delay on a day where I definitely do not have time for a two-hour delay and an actual cancellation would be a huge pain in my ass.
(There is no chance at all of a cancellation, but still.)
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?
I’m sitting in my classroom right now, typing this on my work laptop, and trying to figure out the next nine weeks of my life. It is possible I have overscheduled myself; I got an email today from this course design thing I’m doing with IU that describes what they think the schedule is going to look like, and it’s … a lot, potentially. Then there’s the new committee I’m on at work, which is a few extra hours after school a week, then (eventually) there’s going to be National Board certification, which is just a meeting here and there right now, but soon I’m going to have to start actually doing stuff for it, and I looked up what the content area test was going to be like the other day and, well …
This is for their adolescent (11-15) Mathematics certification, which is going to be the one I’m going for. I teach Algebra, y’all, and I washed out of Calculus in high school and never looked at it again, but, like, right now I think I want to do the content area test first, and the notion that I need to relearn Geometry, Trig, Discrete Math and Calculus in the next few months when I never really learned Calculus in the first place, plus a refresher on stats?
I mean, on the one hand, at least I have something to do this summer, and on the other hand, I’ve wanted to go back and conquer Calculus, because it’s always sort of stuck in my craw that I bailed on it, and on the third hand, the one I don’t have …that’s kind of a lot.
Like, I pass standardized tests. Passing standardized tests is my thing. I’ll be fine. But my studyin’ muscles haven’t really had much of a workout for the last, oh, fifteen years or so– who am I kidding, it’s longer than that, because I’m pretty sure I didn’t have to do a single second of “studying” for my M.Ed– and I’m gonna have to rediscover some skills with a quickness.
Plus, like, even just planning out how to approach all this is intimidating. I’m sure there are plenty of self-paced/free or inexpensive study guides out there, both specifically for this test and for these subjects in general, but that’s basically all of high school math that I need a refresher on plus some stuff I never really touched until college. While designing a course in Quantitative Reasoning for IU, doing whatever I need to do for this other committee, and, oh, teaching the last nine weeks of 8th grade math from school when I haven’t taught physically in my building for literally over a year and figuring out how to keep the kids who are staying home connected to everything else that’s going on.
One step at a time, I suppose.
First step: find a study guide for the test itself; Amazon probably has one. Second step: relearn all of mathematics.
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