If you are breathing you can teach

The day before I took the WEST-B, I called up my sister, a future teacher- the kind who will flunk your butt should you forget your multiplication tables- and asked a very pressing question: "HOW MUCH MATH?"

You see, Internet, the last time I did ANY math I was sixteen years old and working trig problems in excruciatingly neat handwriting every night between basketball practice and going to bed. They might have stuck me in pre-algebra in seventh grade, but I knew the truth: math? So not my forte. I worked HARD in that class and I couldn't even buy an A. The day my trig teacher looked at me (unsympathetically, I might add) and the big fat B on my progress report and said, "Well, maybe that's the best you can do" was a horrible soul-crushing day in the Maggie Space-Time Continuum. The best I could do? Attention teachers: think carefully before you say something of that nature to a Type-A perfectionist teacher's pet freakazoid such as myself. That's all I'm saying. The next year I took calculus, but my school was so small that the four lonely calculus students didn't even have their own class. We sat in the back of a trigonometry class and pretended to "teach ourselves" because "you kids are smart" and "should be able" to "TEACH YOURSELVES CALCULUS" but instead we played Hangman all year. It's possible that Sean Deering, the only one of us even remotely able to teach himself complex math, tried to turn Hangman into a function, but that was the end of my math career. I can rock a spelling test and pick out every grammatical error on public signage, but calculating 67% of 238 is a paralyzing experience. (And seriously? My sixth grade class shot a movie all year instead of learning percents and probability, a fact that continues to horrify my father every time I take more than five seconds to figure out a tip. As I recall, my sixth grade teacher was once a movie extra and somehow thought making an actual movie- written, directed, and acted by sixth graders- would be a worthier endeavor than that old fashioned reading, writing and 'rithmetic. I wasn't complaining then, and not so much now either. I was much lauded for my ability to cry on cue.)

ANYWAY, the Washington Educator Skills Test- Basic, a test existing only to weed out those with lobotomies, contains a Math section. I had no fear of the Reading and Writing sections or even the two essay questions at the end, but the Math section- oh. Maybe the above paragraph didn't make it clear. I DON'T KNOW ANY MATH. The University of Washington does not require English majors to take any class involving functions, graphs or even NUMBERS.

Rebecca provided me with these pearls of wisdom: "Make sure you know what mean, median and mode are. That's it."

I must tell you, Internet, that I wasn't entirely satisfied with this advice. I wasn't worried enough to stay home the night before and study, mind you. No, I had plans involving a long creepy movie and a Fabulous Slice of Chocolate Cake. I printed out some sample math questions and took them along, but I didn't even bother to look at them when I was sitting out the rest of the movie in the lobby. (Seriously. Cutesy biographical flashbacks are one thing in Amelie, they're quite another in a war movie rivaling Saving Private Ryan for gore.)

I managed to look at a few over a glass of wine and the fabulous chocolate cake and spent a few minutes looking up mean, median and mode at Dictionary.com (isn't that where you would go to learn some math?) but I was pretty tired. And you know what they say about cramming.

At 8am on Saturday morning I slouched into the car and drove myself to the testing site where dozens of other Future Teachers were milling around with their coffee and their test tickets and their fistfuls of number two pencils. (Do you know where I got my pencils, Internet? I dug them out of the backseat of my car where Rebecca left them after SHE took the test.) The test people finally let us into the classrooms at 8:30 and the test was administered at 9. I started at the beginning. Raced through the Reading Section. Whipped through the Writing Section. I had a bit of trepidation entering the Math section, but oh my Internet, if my sister wasn't EXACTLY RIGHT ON with her Mean, Median and Mode advice. These were math questions that I UNDERSTOOD. Do you know what that means? It means that in Washington State, you can have the math skills of an incredibly lazy math-is-her-least-favorite-subject 10-year-old and still be entrusted to educate Our Nation's Youth. (You also don't need to know a whole lot regarding literacy either, as far as I could tell.) I could have left ridiculously early, except for the fact that I AM the Type-A perfectionist who can barely function when forced to write an essay in longhand (AN ERASER IS NOT AN EFFICIENT EDITING TOOL.) For my essay on What Makes An Effective Teacher, I waxed rhapsodic on my senior English teacher, the man whose ability to make you tremble with a slight narrowing of the eyes ensured that only the dumbest students didn't finish David Copperfield in time. For my essay on Minimum GPAs for High School and College Athletes: Good or Bad, I quickly hammered out a manifesto on why universities should just cut the crap and PAY the football players already. And then I went home. I have MUCH better things to do on a Saturday.

What's funny is that I don't even really want to apply anymore. While I'm still interested in teaching and think I could make some teenage lives miserable with heavy reading lists and fat writing assignments, I don't really want to go back to school. I especially don't want to pay 25 grand to earn a degree good for only one profession and the chance that I might not even like that profession. Of course, the fact that I'm liking my current job more and more helps with the whole I'll-even-go-to-grad-school-to-get-outta-here scenario. I thought about not showing up Saturday morning, but I paid for that test and maybe I'll think about applying again some day.

I got to trash it on my website too, a fun fact that should definitely not be overlooked. Thanks, WEST-B!