WooHoo!!!! Yippeee!!!! Can you tell I'm excited to be done? I thought last semester stunk, but this one was pretty darn bad. I took an exam today that was ridiculous! I am almost positive that I failed it, but I know for a fact I'm not the only one who did poorly on it. It was a horrible class and although the professor is very knowledgeable about Geology & such (it was an Earth Science class), she has no idea how to teach it at our level. Nor did I think she has any desire to. She seems to hate teaching and hate us (the students) even more. She'd come in every other week looking angry at the world and she'd even yell at us sometimes. When people would ask her to explain stuff they didn't understand from the text she would belittle us and say its written at a very low level ... as if elementary kids could understand it. She was good at making us feel very stupid. At the end of the exam today, there were like 30 people standing outside of the testing room griping about how hard the test was and how we had not learned half of that stuff. One girl even said that she wrote that on her test for the questions she didn't know. Instead of leaving it blank she'd write: "please tell me when we learned this stuff in class, because I'm positive we did not." Some of the girls were so upset they wanted to go straight to the head of the Earth Science department and report her. These were 4.0 students who studied for this test and still felt like they failed it. I feel like our teacher set us up for failure. And to top it off, she has a very strict grading scale that she insists on sticking to. Instead of the typical 90-100 A, 80-89 B, 70-79 C scale, and so on, her scale is 92-100 A, 83-91 B, 74-83 C, 65-73 D, and so on. That scale totally sucks! And the exam was worth soooo much of my grade!!! I'm scared I failed or got a D in the class. If I did I'm gonna have to take a class over the summer to bring my GPA back up and then take EAS again next semester. :-( Pray that that does not happen!

For my other classes I did not have final exams but the final papers that I had to write stunk worse than exams. For my literacy final, I wrote 12 pages about these two kids I had been tutoring, for science I wrote a 10 page reflection of a lesson I taught, and for my math class I wrote a 6 page reflection of two lessons I taught. And this past Saturday I took the second Praxis tests. The Elementary Curriculum: Planning, Instruction, and Assessment wasn't too terribly bad, but the Reading Specialist one totally sucked! I don't understand the reasoning behind us (El Ed majors) having to take a Reading Specialist test. The explanation for this test states that the test is designed for persons in a master's program seeking a master's degree as a Reading Specialist. HELLO! Elementary Education Undergrad HERE!!! Not in a master's program. Not attempting to be a Reading Specialist! I seriously felt like I just started making designs while I was coloring in the bubbles on the scantron sheet. 120 questions that seemed like they were written in a foreign language. We had not been taught hardly any of that stuff in our classes. It seemed like a cruel joke to play on us. Luckily with this test, its not a one-shot deal. Yes I have to pass it in order to Student Teach and to eventually get my teaching license, but I have about 2 more opportunities to take and pass it before I'm scheduled to Student Teach. The major downfall is that the it costs $190 to take it. :-( Let's just hope that I passed it this time so I don't have to take it again. I'll know in about 3 1/2 weeks.

On a lighter note, SCHOOOOOOL'S OUT FOR THE SUMMER!!!!!!