On Thursday an email arrived to inform me that on Friday another email would be sent to let me know if I had passed the MTEL English test or not, talk about building suspense! So the email appeared, and I was so afraid of what it might say that I shut myself in the bathroom to read it. You might have figured that if I'm writing about it I must have gotten good news, and you'd be right. Go me! MTEL stands for Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure, a set of required tests which anyone who wants to teach in the state must pass. All teachers must pass the Communications and Literacy exam and then a separate exam covering their area of expertise. In my case that meant I needed to pass the Secondary English exam.
The way it works is similar to the SAT exam or any other high stakes exam you may have taken. Each test costs roughly $100 in various fees and lasts four hours. I elected to take the Communications and Literacy exam in two four hour segments to improve my chances. I also chose to take what they call the "computer based exam" which means you show up at an office building downtown and take the test on a computer there. The paper based test is the same except you use a workbook and take the test in a high school with a bunch of other wanna-be teachers. I would recommend the computer model only because it allows for greater scheduling options and you don't have to worry about your sloppy handwriting being misunderstood.
I easily passed the C&L tests, as they are called, but I was much more worried about the English. The test prep book alone looked like the yellow pages for a midsize metropolis. It covers not only one's ability to write an essay, analyze and respond to text, punctuate and spell but also deep literary trivia a range of other areas related to working with students. This test can only be taken in a high school, in my case Quincy High on a Saturday in July. It's really quite a sight to see what five hundred nervous aspiring educators look like milling about in a cafeteria. Test takers are expected to be able to basically answer questions about every period in literature from Homer til the present and we're not talking broad questions either, we're talking about "Which of the following authors did not win a Nobel prize?" and "Which of the following best describes Hawthorne's view on man's mortal soul?" I ended up writing a two page essay about Jamaica Kincaid and her garden as a metaphor for man vs. nature and then another essay explaining how the Canterbury Tales is actually a quest story .
Normally when I finish a big exam I have a fairly good idea how I did, I either kicked ass or I bombed, but when I turned in my workbook with a minute to spare I just felt a pit in my stomach. For five weeks I brooded over my performance. I was trying to remember questions and looking up the answers, really screwed up on absurdist theater apparently, and so on. I started reading this big anthology from one of my courses to help me prepare for the inevitable retake, learning all there is to known about literature all over again! I was practically dancing yesterday when I found out I passed, not sure if it was triumph or relief that I would never have to endure the exam again, but damn, I was happy!
Good luck to anyone who hasn't taken their MTELs yet, don't waste another moment - register today! They suck and they can ruin your plans to student teach if you don't allow yourself time to retest in the event of failure. UMB offers a workshop which I took for $75, it only covers the C&L, you might not need it if you usually score well on reading comprehension and mechanics but it does offer peace of mind and practice.
The way it works is similar to the SAT exam or any other high stakes exam you may have taken. Each test costs roughly $100 in various fees and lasts four hours. I elected to take the Communications and Literacy exam in two four hour segments to improve my chances. I also chose to take what they call the "computer based exam" which means you show up at an office building downtown and take the test on a computer there. The paper based test is the same except you use a workbook and take the test in a high school with a bunch of other wanna-be teachers. I would recommend the computer model only because it allows for greater scheduling options and you don't have to worry about your sloppy handwriting being misunderstood.
I easily passed the C&L tests, as they are called, but I was much more worried about the English. The test prep book alone looked like the yellow pages for a midsize metropolis. It covers not only one's ability to write an essay, analyze and respond to text, punctuate and spell but also deep literary trivia a range of other areas related to working with students. This test can only be taken in a high school, in my case Quincy High on a Saturday in July. It's really quite a sight to see what five hundred nervous aspiring educators look like milling about in a cafeteria. Test takers are expected to be able to basically answer questions about every period in literature from Homer til the present and we're not talking broad questions either, we're talking about "Which of the following authors did not win a Nobel prize?" and "Which of the following best describes Hawthorne's view on man's mortal soul?" I ended up writing a two page essay about Jamaica Kincaid and her garden as a metaphor for man vs. nature and then another essay explaining how the Canterbury Tales is actually a quest story .
Normally when I finish a big exam I have a fairly good idea how I did, I either kicked ass or I bombed, but when I turned in my workbook with a minute to spare I just felt a pit in my stomach. For five weeks I brooded over my performance. I was trying to remember questions and looking up the answers, really screwed up on absurdist theater apparently, and so on. I started reading this big anthology from one of my courses to help me prepare for the inevitable retake, learning all there is to known about literature all over again! I was practically dancing yesterday when I found out I passed, not sure if it was triumph or relief that I would never have to endure the exam again, but damn, I was happy!
Good luck to anyone who hasn't taken their MTELs yet, don't waste another moment - register today! They suck and they can ruin your plans to student teach if you don't allow yourself time to retest in the event of failure. UMB offers a workshop which I took for $75, it only covers the C&L, you might not need it if you usually score well on reading comprehension and mechanics but it does offer peace of mind and practice.
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