That test was hard!

I had my test yesterday for the ELL certification. All I can say is that it was sooooo hard!! I finished about 15 minutes before the end of the testing session that was about 2 hours long. The test comprised of a listening section where we had to listen to sections of speech from English language learners and diagnose what their issues were with the language. That part was a little difficult because some of the speakers sounded really clear and spoke clearly to me but they might have had a slight issue with sounds. The next sections were teaching methods and theories and maybe a little bit of law-related material. By the end of the test, my head felt like it wanted to explode and I was really pissed off at the BSU ELL department because the 2 linguistics classes that I took didn't talk about any of the stuff that I encountered on the test!! It was a good thing that I even spent any time preparing for this test on my own because I would've been totally screwed had I not.

This week BSU is having a very important person coming to give a talk and his name is Peter McLaren. The professors have been hyping this man up so much the last few weeks. One lady in my test session asked me if I was going and she sounded so excited about it but I made up a white lie saying I wasn't going because I'm lazy and didn't want to do anything else this week after finishing up classes. Well my real reason for not going is the fact that I don't want to go to anything extra because it would show my support for this program that did not prepare me at all for this test and thanks to them also, that if I get an ELL job soon, I'm going to be so lost as to what to plan for these kids--I have no tools under my belt to plan fun activities to help these kids learn English and I will be jumping in cold turkey. I realize most education classes don't really prepare you for a lot but my undergrad classes actually taught me how to make lesson plans and even gave me some ideas as to what to do in planning language games. Anyway, I won't know my scores for a few weeks (about a month from now) and hopefully I passed it.