Challenger Tests

Here is a little update in my job process. It took so long to update, well because there wasn't much to update about. The woman I sent my resume into apparently never received it. Her husband works with Hal and he was talking to Hal and said she was wondering what ever happened to me as she never received my resume. So, 3 weeks later I called her and re-sent it.
Boy, did she get the ball rolling. She sent my resume to both Farmington and SLC Challenger Schools and told me I would probably best be a teacher intern for right now, and man after taking some tests I agree with her. I think I would want to be a teacher intern anyway to kind of get the feel of how they teach and how their classrooms work.
Less than a week after she e-mailed my info Farmington called me to set up an interview, so I have an interview there next Thursday! Yay!
A woman called me to set up a time to take some test. What? I didn't know this required test taking?! I thought I was done when I took my last final on May 7th. This is where I realized I am really stupid. She said there isn't really a way to prepare for the tests as they cover a lot of information. I kept telling people I was scared of them having information like sentence composition on them...you know the stuff you learn in 3rd grade and then don't use anymore unless you're playing mad-libs...
Well, I'm stupid...maybe me thinking that was the Lord saying: Sam you need to study this. Yeah, it was on the test. The biggest section of the test. So I had 3 different tests, well, one of them was really more of a questionnaire on your views, then I had a 12 minute timed test and then I had the motherload test.
It is meant for them to see which grade you should teach. So they had a grammar, math, reading, and history section. The grammar section was the longest and obviously hardest for me. I mean REEL hard. Here is an example so you can see what I had to do in order to properly feel bad for me.
Example: The elephant looked thirsty, but Ben had already put away the barrel. Then each word had a line underneath it and I had to label the parts of speech each word was. Just to make it harder it said. If you label verb, please indicate whether it is an auxiliary, helping, linking, or action verb...I will spare you even worse examples of grammar I didn't even remember existed.
I am a little bit ashamed to admit that I wrote a note with my awesome white Challenger pencil at the top of the section saying:
Note: I honestly couldn't finish this section.
Sad, huh? Well, my math actually went surprisingly well up until like the last two problems when I made up answers. History and Reading went pretty well and were a lot shorter than math and grammar. Well, I guess if I am going to teach English I will need a lot of training and I won't be teaching 8th grade math any time soon. Blasted fractions and how they confuse me. (Seriously, how am I supposed to figure out what 3/5ths of 1/2 is. I should just get points for understanding that's what the story problem was asking...and if you can figure that out, you suck).
I did have a lovely conversation with the Director of all Challenger schools in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. He told me a crazy story and I told him I thought everyone's values are equal because they honestly believe them and we can't condemn them just because we grew up differently and want to impose our 'right' values on them(guess that's the Anthropologist in me). Anywho, the woman helping me came in also and talked to me for a bit. She said Hal was a smart man for giving me Glen Beck's book, Common Sense to use for the basis of my essay on my views of America. (Challenger is a conservative school). She also said she would keep an eye on me and make sure I didn't get stuck somewhere in the process.
So, I am pretty excited for my interview, and sad for them when they have to see my grammar score. I'm always worried when I see how much I have written that it won't make sense because I don't remember writing that much. So if it doesn't make sense you can just laugh and blame it on my lack of grammar skills.