Tag: Praxis II

One of two Praxis scores

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

I told my principal that if I didn’t pass the Praxis content knowledge test, I wouldn’t take it again.  I felt like I did as well as I would ever do.  In order to pass, I needed to score 157 out of a possible score range from 100-200.  (Yeah, weird system.)  Well, my score report was available online today.

I was right, I did as well as I would ever do.  I scored 200.  *blink-blink*  Yep, the math teacher scored 200 on the English content knowledge test.

I didn’t get everything right, as the score suggests.  I missed 9 out of 120 questions.  Not shabby.  Most were “Literature and Understanding” questions, a very wide category with over half the questions.  I did ace all the “Language and Linguistics” questions.  I missed two “Composition and Rhetoric” questions.

Am I happy?  Enough, I guess.  I sill have to wait a week or so for my pedagogy test score, the one I was worried about.  I’m a little less worried now, but only a little.  We’ll see how it goes.  But so far, so good.

Let’s never do that again

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

At long last, I took my Praxis tests today.  It was harrowing.  It was uncomfortable.  Maybe it was successful.

First came the content knowledge test, 120 questions in 120 minutes.  My practice runs had all been fine, so when I finally began the test in that massive lecture hall with my bubble sheet on the wafer they call a desktop, I was confident.  Question one included a short excerpt from a novel and included refernces to a character named Heathcliff… I should know that…but I didn’t.  Bad start.  I filled in the bubble for Wuthering Heights and moved on.  Score!  Process of elimination rules.

I went on (and on and on) and felt like I knew about half of the answers cold, was able to work out half of the others by eliminating wrong answers, had solid educated conclusions on others, and at least improved my guessing odds through elimination on all but maybe four.  I am confident I passed this one.  More to the point, if I didn’t pass, it’s not likely to get much better and the creative writing scheme is over.

Then came the pedagogy test.  I hope to God I passed that because I never want to endure that torture again.  Firstly (always hated that word), they managed to find a room on campus with smaller desk-wafers, chairs from the Spanish Inquisition, no discernible air conditioning in the midst of a freak tropical monsoon, and a wall so close to my personal space that I don’t want to tell my wife about it (she gets jealous).  I feel like I spent all morning staring at my belly button.

Then the tests were (finally!) distributed.  Two constructed response questions, one evaluating the teaching points of a piece of literature, the other dissecting a (fictional) student’s writing.  I thought I was ready for this test.  I did my reading and my SparkNoting and of course my Rocketbooking.  I had outlines prepared for six different high school literary mainstays: Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, 1984, Beowulf, and as a matter of indulgence, The Hobbit.

All sorts of people insisted that R&J was almost always on the list of stories to write about, so I made it my #2 candidate (behind Frankenstein, whose outline was perfection) in my depth chart.  R&J wasn’t there.  Frank either.  But Gatsby, surely…but no.  1984?  Surely the singular paragon of Old English literature known as Beowulf would be there, right?  No and no.  Oh snap.  But there at the bottom, three stories from the end, was the jewel I never expected to see:  J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit.  It was there.

My first impression: Sweet!

My second impression: What the hell was on that outline?

To make a long story less long, I wrote the evaluation of the student work first (a daydream/adventure about a space ship) and muddled through my Hobbit part as best I could after that.  I finished the rough, low-detailed versions of my responses with time to spare.  Forty-five seconds is technically time, right.  None of my answers were brilliant.  It was okay.  I suspect that test will be a close call on either the pass or fail side.  Hard to say which.

In completely unrelated news, the Anywhere But Here Anthology promptly rejected L.R. this morning.  Running out of places to send that one.  Weird how the world didn’t stop for my test today.

I’m going to take a nap now.

Down the Drain

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

Did you know that a sonnet has 14 syllables per line?  I didn’t…because they have ten.  Even a first grader can count syllables.  But the Cliff’s Notes Praxis II study guide says it’s 14, as in the number of dollars I spent on the book.

It’s in the answers to the practice test that itt comes up.  It also states that said sonnet is written in iambic pentameter (which they are) but provides an answer that denies this.  Arraagh!!

So what?  One little mistake isn’t that bad, is it?  No, not if it’s one.  Upon reading the Amazon reviews of this book I realized that there is a lot of misinformation in the book, both the study notes and the practice test.  And excuse me for not knowing whether Graymalkin was the cat or the toad in Macbeth.  Really, that’s the type of thing the Praxis will ask.  I hope not.

So I will take my practice test grade with a grain of salt and check my wrong answers with other sources.  Then I’ll double-check the ones I got right but wasn’t sure about.  And somewhere in there I’ll make sure I’m ready for my Pedagogy test.

Are there laws protecting people like me from bad information?  If I fail the Praxis due to answers from this book’s faulty information, can I sue Cliff’s Notes for my eighty bucks (cost of the test)?  Hopefully I won’t have to find out.