"It is a far, far better thing that I do..."

It was hard not to channel Sydney Carton as I headed in to take my content test today. This is the second part of my testing to qualify for certification in Illinois - the part that's actually supposed to test my physics knowledge so I can get a physics endorsement on my credential, so I can actually teach physics. Keep that word in mind: "physics".

The test was at the same place as the last test I took, and there was the same throng of educators waiting to get in. The $86/person/test figure flashed into my consciousness, as did the fact that Pearson Education never answered the email I sent them, asking for a statement of how much money they rake in annually from ICTS.

Anyway, back to me and Sydney: I felt a little apprehensive since there's been an awful lot of water under the bridge since I last cracked a physics text in anger. I wondered if my appreciation for the finer points had dulled to the point that I would be hopelessly lost during the test. A bit of a sinking feeling set in as I considered the possibility that I'd recognize the questions but not be able to recall how to set up and solve the problems. Was I trundling off to my own execution here? Only one way to find out, I guess.

I shuffled in with the herd, found my seat and sat down. I noticed right away that the ICTS-approved-and-supplied calculator on my desk was algebraic-entry and NOT the Reverse Polish Notation style that I'm used to. *sigh* Now I'll have to spend valuable time learning how to use this calculator rather than actually solving problems. We had some time to kill, so I sat there making sure the calculator was in degrees rather than radians, figuring out how to enter exponents properly, trigonometric functions, factors of pi, etc. It wasn't too bad, but the possibility certainly existed for some calculator-related mistakes. Just what I needed, I thought.

As it turns out, the calculator was almost unnecessary. The test was 125 questions, and question #44 was the first one that was really related to physics. The first 43 questions covered general science/earth science/biology, and seemed to range from the absurdly vague to the absurdly specific. Then the physics questions started, and they were pretty trivial. I mean, if I have a degree in physics from anywhere other than Podunk Hollow Online University, we should all just agree that I know enough physics to pass that test and skip it. But I know that a career in education will expose me to new worlds of mindless bureaucracy, so I better just get used to it.

So Sydney Carton was spared the guillotine. Or was he? I certainly could have failed that test (and Murphy, being the bastard that he is, might yet apply his law in this case). But if I did fail, it certainly wasn't due to any lack of physics knowledge. No - if I failed that test it's because I didn't remember the finer points of cell biology (not even sure I knew them in the first place), or earth science, or one of the other subjects that was interwoven with the physics. In other words, if I fail to obtain my physics endorsement by failing this test, it's because I'm rusty on some subjects other than physics. How insane is that?

The troubling thing is, I don't know what (if anything) I'm going to do about it if I fail. I'm certainly not going to go back and take some biology and earth science courses just to prepare to re-take this test, and then NOT get an endorsement in those subjects. Maybe Syd's still in the wagon after all...