High School Time Warp

Here is the thing about this past semester. I have thought entirely too much about high school. Since November I've had a job where I read UNCW undergraduate applications for the Admissions Department. I have to fill in the student's major classes into a form, asses the quantity/quality of their extracurriculars, then read their essay and recommendation and rate those. It's a little bit of glorified data entry, but I find it oddly appealing because I have seven minutes to get a picture of someone's life, then recommend acceptance or no to UNCW based on that. So every time I type in AP Government, I think about my own AP Government class (bad experience). Or, whenever someone gets to take Studies in Short Fiction, I think, geez, I wish we had that class when I was in high school. I promise, there is not a minute of high school that I still remember that I haven't thought of while working this job. 

This past Saturday I took the Praxis II and it was the total pinnacle of reliving high school. (This is the test that tests content knowledge for the subject your interested in teaching. I took the English Language, Literature, and Composition test for 7-12th grade.) Technically, having a bachelor's degree in English with a few education classes (which I don't have, but most of which were common sense questions)  prepares you to take the test. Well, I don't think my bachelor's degree did me much good, because it seemed like most of the test was over stuff I learned in high school. I know this makes a little sense, because it's what you would teach to high schoolers, but I know some of that stuff is subjective. As in, all the books I read in college were perfectly capable of being taught in high school, but I just happened to read some in college, and others in high school, and the test was entirely over the things I learned in high school.

But in a weird way, it was fun. Creative Writing is so subjective, it was nice to take a multiple choice test where I knew most of the answers. But I wonder what I would have scored if I took it right out of high school. That would be interesting.