one down, nine to go

Yuck...humble pie.

But the good news is that I didn't have to eat too much of it. Just a slice.

Today I started my content class for my teacher certification. It's scheduled for 10 days, 8am - 5pm each day. I've been promised that our teacher will cut it dramatically short. I sure hope so.

Today, our teacher wasn't there, but she left ME a practice test to take. See, my class has 4 students, and the other three have already taken and passed their content exam. So they didn't have to take the practice test. They got to leave. I was alone in the room with the substitute teacher (babysitter) for almost three hours. The test was 80 questions, and I barely got finished in time.

I'm certifying to teach math in grades 8-12. I used to know my stuff. I studied math for four years. I think I took something like 15 different math classes. But that was a long time ago. I was afraid that calculus would be on the test. See, I took calculus in 1995. And haven't seen it since. I've tutored several students in math over the years, but not once did I have anyone ask for help with logarithms or derivatives or even integrals. And so it's gone. All that knowledge and skill is just gone.

The good news was that although logarithms were on the test (but I think I remembered enough to give a good guess) there was no other calculus. I hope this is true for the real exam.

The bad news was that there were several statistics questions, and I swear I never learned any statistics. I didn't even have enough information to take a guess. At least I know what I'll need to focus on and re-learn (or learn for the first time as with statistics) over the next 9 class periods. I scheduled my state exam for two days after I finish the class. I didn't want to allow any time for the knowledge to seep back out of my brain.

Really, I'm counting on one thing--that doing upper level math is like riding a bike.