Nothing but the Best

Tomorrow I'm taking the CBEST exam. It's a standardized test that doesn't do anything.

Well, okay, if you want to teach in California, you have to pass the CBEST examination. So it does something, but I still kind of can't figure out exactly what happens if you pass. I'd assume that, once you've passed, people will randomly call you and offer you teaching positions, but this apparently isn't the case. You just become licensed to teach. Which is kind of like being licensed to fly an airplane when you don't own one. A nice thing to have in case of airborne emergency but essentially useless.

I'm a little nervous. Generally, I do quite well on standardized exams. I aced the SAT and did well enough on the GRE to get into an (also useless) grad program at USC. So it's not the situation that gets me nervous. It's the fact that I'm being asked to perform algebra.

I'm no good at algebra. It's this collision of language and math, and those are two great tastes that don't neccessarily go great together. I can handle something like 2+2=4. Those are all numbers, so it makes sense. If I have two trampolines and I buy two more trampolines...I have 4 trampolines. Which I should sell, because no one needs four trampolines unless they're one of the Ringling Brothers.

Even the real basic algebra stuff, I can handle. 2+x=4. Okay, you see that, you know x has to be two. Because two twos make a four. Easy so far.

But once you start getting into fractions, or more than one letter in the equation, I get kind of mixed up. And then there are the word problems, where they express a question in paragraph form and you have to come up with the answer, even though it's more like a reading comprehension problem than a math problem.

Stuff like this:

Jim can do X amount of work in an hour. Jane can do that same amount of work in 90 minutes. Bill can do that same amount of work in 15 minutes. If they all work together, how quickly can they get X amount of work done?

To solve this problem, you have to make up a whole lot of fake numbers, like 3x or x-10 or -x/4 or some shit. It's stupid. How should I know how much Jim, Bill and Jane can get done? Maybe they don't work well together. Maybe there isn't any profit sharing at their company, so they don't give a shit how quickly X amount of work can get done. Maybe they've been doing X work for the past several years and are completely fed up with it, and today, instead of getting work done, they're going to march into their bosses office and shove their work directly up his X.

Maybe I'll just write that in on the Scantron.

The other thing that unsettles me about tomorrow's CBEST exam? It's being held at 8:30 in the goddamn morning, across town. This is clearly unfair, because not all of us function at our intellectual best at 8:30 am. Some of our brains don't really activate for a new day until noon, which is likely when the test will end.

What's the goddamn point of starting the test that early anyway? It seems kind of like a test on top of the test - first, they're seeing whether you'll bother to show up at 8:30 in the morning on a Saturday, thus ruining your entire weekend, and then they'll see if you can figure out that Bill/Jane/Jim algebra bullshit.

Also, it's unfair that I have to drive so far out of my way to get to the testing center. This is Los Angeles - that place may only be 5 miles away, but it's a massive drive to do in the morning when you're in a rush to go take a stupid standardized test. They might as well hold it in the Appalachians or Juarez or something.

When I signed up, they have to fill in a blank about where you'd like to take the test. I checked the bubble that said, I swear to you, the following: "West Los Angeles (Santa Monica)"

Which makes sense, because I am Santa Monica-adjacent. But no. We all get funnelled to Los Angeles High School near the corner of Highland and Olympic. So tomorrow, I'm facing a Frodo-like pilgrimage across Los Angeles at 7:30 in the morning. I'll be lucky if I can remember my own name when I get to the testing center. I'll probably miss the practice questions.

I guess the one good thing about having the test so early is I'll have plenty of day left by the time the test is over. Time which I can use for two activities - trying to catch up on all the sleep I'm going to miss in the morning and neurotically second-guessing all of my test answers.

In high school, whenever I'd get out of a test like this, a group of us would stand in a circle outside the testing center and gauge how well each of us did. I don't know how we did this, but my friends and I genuinely would recall almost all the difficult test questions and figure out what the answers were together, all in the course of a few minutes.

Man, I was so much smarter in high school! I could never do that now! When I exit from the test center tomorrow, I'll be totally out of it, in a complete daze. I'll be lucky if I remember what test I just completed, let alone what all the hard questions were and what I answered for them. So I'll have to wait 6-8 weeks to determine whether I'm a potential Los Angeles Unified School District teacher, or just some bum who works at a local video store.