the mtel

i just finished the massachusetts teachers' educator licensure exam. i'm not sure if that's what the t stands for, actually. that's not important. the thing took forever. i took communications and literature in the morning and high school mathematics in the afternoon. one has 4 hours to do each.

the communications and literature test is divided into a reading subtest and a writing subtest. the reading had 30 reading comprehension questions, 6 vocabulary definitions, and i forget what else. the writing had 30 sentence corrections, and maybe 30 passage editing questions? i don't remember which was in what section, really. reading and writing seem somewhat related to me... the writing also had 3 grammatical terms and 3 short answer sentence rewrites. at the end there are two open response questions, one requires that you summarize a passage and one requires you choose a side in a debate and then defend it (like the SAT II writing). the whole thing took me 2.5 stupid hours. i could've finished faster but i started taking my time once i realized how much extra time i had.

some stuff... the vocab was accustomed, designate, peril, relentless, and two words i can't remember. the grammatical terms were adverb, imperative sentence, and interrogative sentence.

i walked into my math exam room and counted 4 men and 18 women. i thought that was a little strange, but then the proctor said something about elementary and middle school math, as well as physics and chemistry. he only handed out 2 calculators, which were provided for hs math and physics (and maybe chemistry), so those womenfolk were testing for good old arithmetic. my world makes sense again.

the math was painful. 3.5 hours. 100 mc questions and 2 open response. the or were really easy. so were the mc, for the most part, but i probably made some careless mistakes. however, i have no idea what a correlative constant is. and there was some other term i didn't recognize. also, one question asked who generally receives the credit for inventing calculus, and another was who generally receives the credit for inventing -- was it algebra? i don't think it was geometry... what else is there?

out of a score of 100, a 70 is passing. i hope i blew all of the dinosaurs out of the water. my hand hurts.