ORELA

well I finally took the ORELA, Oregon's content-knowledge test for middle school teachers and others who teach at the secondary level in self-contained classrooms. Uggh. Glad that's over with...taking a multiple choice test in a room with no natural lighting is NOT a fun way to spend a Saturday.

The ORELA's kind of weird. In some ways it's almost hard, and at the same time, very easy. I can't explain it, except to say that the questions have a strange feel to them.

I think the part that's the most strange about the ORELA, in my eyes, is that it covers quite a lot of (what I consider to be) high school-level material. Now I realize they've beefed up a lot of the curriculum. I realize that instead of coloring pictures and playing with toys, kindergartners are now being tested in Mathematics (I'd love to know that that looks like). I realize that kids are starting to take chemistry as early as 8th grade (we certainly didn't in my day, thank god). But the last time I checked, NOBODY was teaching economics in middle school. So I think it's really kind of weird to get econ questions on the social studies portion.

The language arts section, on the other hand, is way too easy, and doesn't include enough grammar/mechanics/syntax questions. This pains me because I think a lot of kids come to high school without enough background in this aspect of language arts--I see it all the time, and it just drives me crazy. This is the aspect of language arts that I feel gets a bit neglected, which is unfortunate because being able to write grammatically-correct compositions is something kids absolutely need to learn how to do. What I secretly suspect is there are enough teachers out there (who are weak in this area themselves) that are perpetuating this tendency that it's going to continue. Sadly, high school is far too late to start an intervention for this sort of thing.

Maybe I'm just crabby because I spent most of my Saturday (and $80) to take another standardized test. I still have the ESL Praxis to look forward to... Everyone I've talked to says it's hard, but I'm one of those crazy types who is good at linguistics, and surely by now I know enough about ESL and language in general that I should do fine.