Exam

Two weekends ago, I took the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure (MTEL). It took eight hours: half for the Communication & Literacy Skills portion, and half for the English test. Living in Virginia helped prepare me for the test, since Lynn, MA, like most of New England at the time, had a bit of a heatwave. No air-conditioning in an old high school was no problem.

In addition to heat acclimation, I also got ready for the test by studying some literary theory vocabulary. A friend told me to expect many questions about theory, and it's an area that I hadn't formally studied. Many of the terms' definitions, however, blended together. And it took great work to find and pin down the nuance between similar ideas or schools of thinking.

So, while brushing up on vocabulary between the two tests, I wrote the following: Learning a term or phrase gives its idea/concept a solid mental place/existence (parameters) - words create order out of the abstract, boundaries within that which bleeds together. This has deep implications for how we perceive the world.

The pursuit of precise terms that capture specific ideas reminds me of the scientific pursuit of matter's fundamental components. Actually, that's a poor analogy. Maybe it better compares to the identification and classification of chemistry's elements. In either case, though, it shows our desire to better understand our perceived scale of the world by moving to a scale outside of the naked eye. To classify and conquer.