steph vs. the accuplacer

Sometimes in life you catch a break.

Like when you think you need to go back to school.  Again.  But this time you feel ready and there's a specific outcome that you're working towards rather than a vague description of "getting a degree."

I had to take the accuplacer before I could register for classes and I was having major anxiety attacks over it.  I wasn't too worried about the English part of the test, but the math section...

Man alive.  I can barely help my kids with their math homework and they're still in Elementary school.  You want me to take a test after how many years to see if I can place in a college level class for credit?

I'm a firm believer that you can learn (or relearn) anything through google (or whatever search engine you prefer) so that's where I naturally started.  I knew I had to get on with it.  I found some practice tests and I felt I breezed through the English section (which I did), but then hit a brick wall when I came to the math sections.  I could still do the decimal timesing and fractions weren't a problem but anything else...

So I took another practice test, but this time I started googling "how to" for math.  I landed in YouTube where there were a ton of videos of mathematically minded people demonstrating how to do various problems and I started to remember.

I started to get excited. 

I can do this!

I really felt I could so I tackled that practice test again and had great confidence in facing those problems. 

Until I looked at the answers.

I'd gotten every single one wrong.

I had been working on remembering how to do math for a week and it was apparently not "taking" in my brain.  I resolved myself to the inevitable and told The Man that I would just have to take some non-credit classes.  It wouldn't be any good for me to get into a credit class anyway, if I can't remember it or keep up with it I'd just bomb the class.  No, I came to terms with the fact that I'd need the extra help, and I was okay with that. 

So I put on my big girl panties, and went to work on a Friday morning with plans of leaving early and heading over the the college to take the test.  I joked with my co-workers that I was going to leave to fail a test and they all said they'd had to take non-credit for a while too and to not worry about it.  They also started throwing out advice,
remember the order of operations
remember "FOIL", first, outside, inside, last.

Thanks guys.

I headed out into the warm afternoon, completely calm.  I swung by McD's for a coke.  Yup, I went there.
I drove the 15 minutes to the campus and parked in visitor parking. 
I walked calmly across campus to the building I needed and went down the stairs into the basement.
I was fine until I had to walk the entire length of this very barren hallway.
For some reason it felt like irony to me... walking down a very long, desolate hallway to the one thing you don't want to be doing...

I was told there is no time limit for the test, but on average it took about an hour and a half.

I put my resolve in my back pocket and followed the lady into the testing center where she set up my computer and off I went.

I plunked away at the questions one by one and then... it was over.  It had barely been an hour and I was a little shocked.  I'd expected more questions and suddenly I was one click away from seeing my results. 

I clicked finished.

And I literally gasped.  Literally.  The guy next to me looked at me when I did it.

I had placed in a credit math class.  I almost cried.

Pathetic, I know. 

Maybe this school thing won't be too bad this go 'round.  Like I said, this time I'm ready for it.