So, as some of you may have previously known, today was about me taking the Praxis II Social Studies exam set, which is one of those hoops I need to jump through to get into teaching school.
It turns out that that A, the closest test center to me is Monmouth, which is an hour away, and B, the test starts at 7:45 in the morning and you're supposed to be there half an hour early. Which is how I came to find myself, with a whopping 3.5 hours of sleep, outside this building at Western at 7 am, where I am met by one of the test people unlocking the doors.
"Here for the Praxis tests?"
"Yeah."
"Well, check-in begins at 7:45. You'll need to wait out here until then."
Well, suck. However, there is a very comfortable wooden bench right there. Nappage ensues, for however much you can nap at, you know, SEVEN IN THE MORNING.
7:45, we all line up, they check our admission tickets, send us to rooms, the people in the rooms check IDs, we hang out for a bit, the guy reads some instructions he has to read, and we get down to the first test, which is like 130 multiple choice questions covering history, geography, economics, and sociology. This last was somewhat disconcerting, because, well, who knew I'd need that, ever?
So that bit was some guesswork. But the rest of the test? Well, let me tell you about that. Trained chimpanzees could take that test, it was so easy. I'm pretty sure I could've passed that test out of high school. It was sad. We had, say, 2 hours to take it. I'm done before the hour mark, done checking my work thoroughly before the half hour mark, and along with half the rest of the people was asleep by the end of time.
Returned outside. Hung out for half an hour until test 2 started. Talked to some actual teachers, who were like "Yeah, George W totally screwed us with the whole No Child Left Behind thing. We've been teaching longer than you've been alive, and we have to take some pathetic test. This is stupid." After a bit of this, we go through the whole check-in thing again, and go to take test #2, the social studies essay test.
This, it turns out, is structured exactly like any given history test I ever had in college, wherein I had an hour to complete the thing. For this, I have two hours. Discerning readers will guess that, yes, I was done by the hour mark. Because, ok. Describe MLK's policies and hinderences to same in a paragraph? Done. Describe the geographical effects of South America on population density? No problem. Talk about supply and demand shifts? No problem. Write a page on the effects of railroads on the development of 19th century America? Yeah, that's not a problem. So I got like another hour of nappage in.
Chimpanzees, I'm telling you.
I got home and slept for 5 hours. It was awesome.
Upon waking up, however, it became apparent that I didn't have the internet, which was largely ungood. So I spent something like 2 hours trying to figure out the problem. I pretty much forgot Networking Rule #1, which says "Thou shalt not ever useth Linksys, for their routers are shit."
Yeah, so it turns out that the whole problem involved my computer sending a request to the router for an IP addy, and the router pretty much going "But I am le tired!" and not doing anything, thus leading to lack of connectivity. However, upgrading the router firmware fixed the issue pretty much instantly.
But here's the thing. My router has had like, 4 versions of the actual router over the past 4 years. My particular version has been recieving firmware updates since 2003. Nowhere during this time did anybody go "Uh, guys? Guys?" It would seem not, because the particular problem I was having didn't get resolved until, you know, April of this year.
I'm not sure what people did before that time. I guess it involved sacrificing, you know, chickens or goats or something.
Posted by Dwip at August 6, 2005 10:23 PM