praxis madness

yo, i musta been crazy.
what was i thinkin' takin' two big ol' tests like that in one day?
i did the double AP test back in '95 and you'd think i'd learned my lesson...

so yeah, against all advice, i took two sessions of the praxis II in one day.

the multiple choice one wasn't so bad. not nearly as many grammar questions as i had expected...and i kinda wish there had been more because i'm good at that sort of thing. good thing i reviewed "literary terms" the night before because those were on there with a vengeance. the other questions of course, were about books i haven't read since my senior year of highschool which was years ago. the questions weren't detailed, but you had to have read the books, and retained some of the information or flavor of the book.
the tricky thing is the stuff they're reading in highschool now is quite different than what was "required reading" in my times. i would love to have read the stuff on the reading list now. but multiculturalism hadn't hit our neck of the woods yet. so some of the stuff was beyond my ken.

running into brian was a nice unexpected bonus. i needed a hug, and lucky for me, my husband was right there.

the essay portion was hard. not for reasons i could explain very easily. i'm good at writing essays but not in timed intervals. poem interpretation is something i can do but i'm not stellar at it. the hardest part was the list of novels for the last question included primarily novels i was never exposed to in school. again because of my vintage i guess. makes me wish i had visited the juvenile fiction section of the library a little more frequently while i worked at "the misplic". i wasn't in lit though...i was rockin' black's legal dictionary, the cole directory and the community information database. hmm. so yeah, if you are planning on making the praxis language and literature, composition test a part of your future, review your highschool reading, and read all the stuff the kids are reading now, for good measure. you never know what might turn up on that thing. the other tricky part was figuring out how long to make the responses. the fact that they give you 5 pages to write on is a bit intimidating. the second part is the first time in my whole life i didn't finish the test a half an hour early. nope my pencil was moving when time was called.

we were released, and i was never so glad to go home, but i was so tired and out of it that i couldn't figure out quite how to do it. the bus way home and the car way home are two different creatures. they barely intersect. i got it all muddled up. my brain positively hurt after all that standardized testing. i had to take a nap for sure when i got home.

i'll be perfectly happy to do some non-academic reading only until class starts. i think i've done enough for an entire year in the past two weeks.