Tonight's Poet Corner: Introspection
Tonight's introspection is being typed up a little earlier than most Fridays. Hell, usually I'm scraping close to midnight with these things. But tonight is different - mostly because I need to be in bed by, at the latest, 10:00.
I will be driving up to Windsor in order to take all four English subtests of the CSET. Obviously, the mistake here was taking them all in the same day. This was clearly done two months back because I thought I would be rushing to get teaching credential applications in. This ultimately did not end up happening, but I kept the CSET on the date I got it for because, honestly, the next time scheduled was pretty far off. So, instead of taking maybe two subtests for one day, I'm taking all four.
I'm obviously privy to making mistakes. Dropping the ball, stepping in it, and, to put it more bluntly, fucking up are fairly common in my life. In this case, I waited until a week before the test before actually looking at what I had to study. I guess, in my work and music and fiction-addled mind, I figured it'd be like other exams I'd taken in college, written ones based on passages and prompts. Yes, three subtests are all about that, though the first subtest does expect you to know some literary terms and rhetorical methods - which I do know, readily, based on my high school work and my college courses. But the second subtest was what really threw me for a loop and actually tempted me to abandon taking the CSET altogether, thereby wasting a solid two hundred dollars.
I have never, ever taken a linguistics class in my life. My sister has, so she certainly helped, but looking at all the terms and history and studies behind the actual English language itself just short-circuited parts of my brain. I did not know what I was reading, so of course, having only a week to study made it all the worse. So out of all the subtests, I'm fairly certain I will struggle the most with linguistics.
It's funny, though, how enthusiastic I am about wordplay while not maintaining much energy for linguistics. There's a reason for it - scholars can enjoy the history of language all they want, and that's admirable. But for me, the fact that I have to take a test on technical terms of English to prove I'm a good English teacher is odd to me. I never learned linguistics in high school, and honestly, high school is not a good place for that. Hell, I even have my own qualms regarding how English departments are run in secondary school environments. To me, the thrill of literature is inevitably robbed when the argument that there is a best interpretation comes into play. It narrows the scope of perception, in my eyes, and drains away the life of a book. Linguistics and literary analysis, to me, need to be approached not for the sake of perfect analysis, but for the sake of breaking down a miraculous scope of reading, writing, and speaking for the more curiously minded. So, maybe I'd want to learn what a morpheme is on my own time, but to teach it to a room of fourteen to eighteen year olds? That's the opposite realm of ideal.
But hey, reality is reality, and I'll be taking this test at 7:30 tomorrow morning, so I'll need to be up at 5:45 at the latest. I have my number two pencils ready to go. I'm printing out my admission ticket. I have all the necessay identification. I'll be walking into this school knowing that it will be like the SAT and ACT all over again - more difficult, but to me, just as soulless. I really do mean the words I wrote in my latest sonnet, "The Scantron Is The Enemy." Teaching ability should not be weighted on memorization of terms - that's not how we're meant to teach. We teach by example, and we teach knowing that we as mentors still have more to learn, especially from our students. Why can't they make a suitable "test" for that?
Writer's Quotation of the Night:
I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
- Steven Wright
Have a great night and a great weekend, everyone. We'll see how braindead I am after this pseudo-valiant testing effort.
I will be driving up to Windsor in order to take all four English subtests of the CSET. Obviously, the mistake here was taking them all in the same day. This was clearly done two months back because I thought I would be rushing to get teaching credential applications in. This ultimately did not end up happening, but I kept the CSET on the date I got it for because, honestly, the next time scheduled was pretty far off. So, instead of taking maybe two subtests for one day, I'm taking all four.
I'm obviously privy to making mistakes. Dropping the ball, stepping in it, and, to put it more bluntly, fucking up are fairly common in my life. In this case, I waited until a week before the test before actually looking at what I had to study. I guess, in my work and music and fiction-addled mind, I figured it'd be like other exams I'd taken in college, written ones based on passages and prompts. Yes, three subtests are all about that, though the first subtest does expect you to know some literary terms and rhetorical methods - which I do know, readily, based on my high school work and my college courses. But the second subtest was what really threw me for a loop and actually tempted me to abandon taking the CSET altogether, thereby wasting a solid two hundred dollars.
I have never, ever taken a linguistics class in my life. My sister has, so she certainly helped, but looking at all the terms and history and studies behind the actual English language itself just short-circuited parts of my brain. I did not know what I was reading, so of course, having only a week to study made it all the worse. So out of all the subtests, I'm fairly certain I will struggle the most with linguistics.
It's funny, though, how enthusiastic I am about wordplay while not maintaining much energy for linguistics. There's a reason for it - scholars can enjoy the history of language all they want, and that's admirable. But for me, the fact that I have to take a test on technical terms of English to prove I'm a good English teacher is odd to me. I never learned linguistics in high school, and honestly, high school is not a good place for that. Hell, I even have my own qualms regarding how English departments are run in secondary school environments. To me, the thrill of literature is inevitably robbed when the argument that there is a best interpretation comes into play. It narrows the scope of perception, in my eyes, and drains away the life of a book. Linguistics and literary analysis, to me, need to be approached not for the sake of perfect analysis, but for the sake of breaking down a miraculous scope of reading, writing, and speaking for the more curiously minded. So, maybe I'd want to learn what a morpheme is on my own time, but to teach it to a room of fourteen to eighteen year olds? That's the opposite realm of ideal.
But hey, reality is reality, and I'll be taking this test at 7:30 tomorrow morning, so I'll need to be up at 5:45 at the latest. I have my number two pencils ready to go. I'm printing out my admission ticket. I have all the necessay identification. I'll be walking into this school knowing that it will be like the SAT and ACT all over again - more difficult, but to me, just as soulless. I really do mean the words I wrote in my latest sonnet, "The Scantron Is The Enemy." Teaching ability should not be weighted on memorization of terms - that's not how we're meant to teach. We teach by example, and we teach knowing that we as mentors still have more to learn, especially from our students. Why can't they make a suitable "test" for that?
Writer's Quotation of the Night:
I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
- Steven Wright
Have a great night and a great weekend, everyone. We'll see how braindead I am after this pseudo-valiant testing effort.
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