I did my maths test again today. And I passed

Yes folks, I am operating at GCSE level maths again

I dunno, I can write correctly normalised databases straight out of my head, I can code hideously complex software. I even once managed to write a fractal generator. But none of that is hard compared to “You are organising a school trip. There are 32 students, 8 of which have paid £2.50. What is the proportion of students who have not paid? Express this in its lowest common denominator… you have 18 seconds and cannot use a calculator”.

These questions were obviously not written by real teachers. Real teachers have no need to quickly calculate anything in their heads. When asked a maths question the response is “work it out yourself and I’ll come back in five minutes”

Some of the questions were pretty easy, some I went “Err wtf?” and just waited for it to time me out. Some were actually quite ambiguous and took me a few minutes to understand!

I had spare time to review my answers at the end and in the final 30 seconds remembered how to complete a question I’d missed out. Cue lots of frantic scribbling and thinking as the timer ticked down. I had a James Bond moment and just managed to get the answer in before the timer expired

It’s one less thing I have to do again in my life. I like that. It’s also one more of my sacred Teaching Standards that I have completed. They are a little like XBLA achievements, but instead of gaining them by kicking people in the head or doing a forward flip they are achieved by “taking into account the students’ social, moral and ethnic backgrounds” and other teachery stuff.

OK, in order to become a qualified teacher you have to pass three tests. One on numeracy (maths), one on literacy (English) and one on ICT. Every trainee teacher has to do these tests, even if they are in your subject area. It doesn’t matter that I have a degree in Software Engineering, an A-Level in Computing and half a GCSE in IT. Nor does it matter that I use computers daily and have done since… ever.

No, I still have to take a daft ICT exam. It took me fifteen minutes, most of which was double checking my answers to ensure I wasn’t doing stupid things. The test was quite well created really, with a fake desktop and applications to play with and I suppose for a non IT person it might be slightly challenging (and no doubt the maths people are saying the same about the maths test I failed).

Obviously I passed it. If I hadn’t you’d be reading about me in the news after being found swinging from my washing line.

I’m now off to the Lake District until Saturday with school

Well… shit. I failed the bloody thing by three marks. I need to work on my mental arithmetic and statistical analysis.
It’s silly. The questions it asks I’d never need to do in my head within 18 seconds – I’m an IT teacher, we don’t pay thousands to Microsoft just so we can do maths in our heads
Booked it again for next Tuesday.

Ooer, I’m off to do a maths test. There are a number of mental arithmetic questions, some statistical stuff and then “general mathematics”.
Joyful…
Damn QTS tests, I’ll be glad when they’re over.