In which the machinery of government moves … quickly?

Holy shit, y’all. I applied for my high school math licensure literally yesterday and I got an email today that my addition had been approved and my license was updated. This from, remember, sending them test results from a test that took forty days to get official score results on, and in what is almost certainly their busiest time of the year.

I’ve talked my fair amount of shit about the IDOE during my time working here, but they’re absolutely on point with getting licenses up to date. Damn.

And, yes, that’s seven different content areas I’m licensed for. I really should get my science licensure just for the hell of it.

Adding to the level of today’s miraculousness, of three meetings I was expected to attend today, two ended early– one by forty-five minutes, and that was the one I was fully expecting to eat every single second of its allotted time– and the third took within a minute of precisely the time it was planned for. Tomorrow is going to be a crazy-long day because it’s parent-teacher night, and I have to dress like a grown-up and everything, but Wednesday should be pretty chill and then on Thursday the children arrive.

We are still missing two math teachers– a department that should be five people is only three– so I got another overage approved today. It went fine last year, so unless this group of kids is markedly more evil than last year’s– cross your fingers– I should be able to manage it just fine. I would always rather have an overage and soak up the enormous amount of extra money you get paid for it than be constantly getting phone calls to cover random classes during my prep period anyway.

That said, because I’ll be at work for twelve hours tomorrow, expect a video update at best. I will be in full no-brain-only-sleep mode by the time I get home, especially since I got no meaningful sleep at all last night and am kind of running on fumes already.

Here we go here we go here we go.

In which it looks like I can do this

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.