Maine has a teacher retention problem, as do many other states. Apparently Maine has decided that more teachers will stay if it's harder to become a teacher, though I don't quite understand the logic there. Yesterday I got up at 4:00 a.m., drove to Farmington, and spent the whole day taking tests that will (I hope) convince the State of Maine that I am a competent person who should be allowed to teach the class that I've been teaching for almost 2 years now. <sarcasm>Yay</sarcasm>.
The highlight of yesterday came at 2:15 p.m., when a bunch of us took the PLT ("Principles of Learning and Teaching"), a test that Maine decided to add last year. Maine is still trying to figure out what the minimum score requirement should be, so what they're doing is requiring new teachers to take it (at our expense) and using our scores to form the basis for deciding what the minimum requirement should be. Um, huh? Tell a bunch of people that they have to take this test but that it won't count, thereby essentially telling them that they shouldn't bother to study for it, and then use those scores as the basis for a minimum score requirement? The logic escapes me.
I'd heard that the PLT was both impossible to study for and an impossible test to take. It was grueling, 2 hours with about 1.5 of those spent writing essays. I thought the multiple choice was pretty easy, if I put a halo on and answered as if I were a perfectly angelic theoretical teacher who had had no real-world experience. The essays weren't bad, but I didn't relate my essay answers to any of the various theories on teaching that they mentioned, since I had no idea what they were. Ah well, at least I can rest easy knowing that my score will be used to help determine minimum score requirements.
That morning I had taken the Praxis II ("General Vocational Knowledge"). It was harder than I expected, given the number of people at my school who said it was a piece of cake. I'm sure I did abysmally in the Social Studies section, but I should have gotten a near-perfect score on the Math, so with luck I'll come out OK. I'd just like to mention how much I hate ambiguous math questions. Does a question that says "which of the following are strategies for solving this problem..." mean "which would work in this case" or "which would work in all cases involving problems of this sort"? The problem would have been solved by finding the first number, and then giving its factorial. One of the answers said* to find the first number and then multiply it by another number. That would work in this case, but not in any other case. Then I tried to guess at what level of math knowledge they would think I had, and how would I answer it in that case, and then finally I decided I just didn't care and just picked something. Feh.
After driving the 2 hours back home, I ate dinner, crashed on my bed and slept for a full 12 hours. Brain fatigue. Just now I calculated that in order to get my teaching certificate I will have spent $675 in tests and fees. Good grief.
*note that I am disguising the question a bit, so ETS doesn't come after me for discussing the PRAXIS where another test-taker might remember it and thus have the advantage of being just as confused as I was! Horrors!