Will This Be On The Test?

OK, despite the sharp pains down my neck and spine from looking down all day yesterday, I have a pretty good feeling about the MTEL. For those who don’t know there are two exams to take for a license to teach in Massachusetts. The first is a communication skills exam that every one takes. There's also a qualifying exam in the particular subject to be licensed in. The big surprise is that I chose chemistry. Both exams are about four hours long.

The communication exam was pure Easy Bake Oven for me. From the way Lisa describes it when she took it, they’ve changed the exam and made it much simpler. It’s probably a good thing too. That was the exam that several veteran teachers failed when it first rolled out. It even made national headlines when some high profile individuals failed. I’m pretty sure I passed it. I may even have found a mistake where one question carried over from the 20th century made mention of the last century, the 19th century. The last century is now the 20th. It’s a minor point but still nagging when your future is on the line. One thing I really wished I could have done is typed my answers for the essay. My handwriting is a brutal mix of intercaps and different ways to write a single letter depending on the letters before and after. Staying on the line alone hurt my hand.

The chemistry exam was also a slice of Georgia Peach Pie until the two essay questions at the end. The 80 multiple-choice questions were pretty easy. There was only one that I flat out guessed with a 1 in 4 chance of winning. There were a couple questions that I consider trivia not chemistry. One was about the Gold Foil experiment, briefly, neutrons are fired into a thin gold foil, most pass through but some scatter and bounce back thus proving the existence of the nucleus. Another was about the Bohr Model of the atom, which is no longer considered accurate but is still taught out of respect for Niels Bohr.

The two essay questions were a different story. One question was on titrations, which I’m pretty sure I got 100%. You have an unknown concentration of hydrochloric acid and a known concentration of sodium hydroxide, how do you find the concentration of the HCl? The other question was about ∆G=∆H-T∆S, the formula for Gibbs Free Energy. It’s been 6 years since I looked at thermodynamics. That’s where things went woefully wrong for me.

Lucky for me that the essay questions are only worth 25% of the exam. I’m only looking at 13% off which is still a B. I may have passed it but I’m not going to be terribly disappointed if I find out otherwise. I can easily take it again in May. In the mean time I think I’m going to brush up on thermodynamics. Just in case.

As for how the advertising revenues are treating me, I can't figure any of it out. Yesterday one hit earned about $74 but 4 hits later that number fell to less then $30. I've still made more money in March then I did from the last two weeks in February. So far I'm now worth about 75 cents a day. That may change.