I'd like to tell you a story of courage. Of resilience. Of the will to never give up, despite what feels like insurmountable obstacles.
But before I do that, can we just take a minute and talk about plant cells?
You know, how they have a cell membrane to serve as the gatekeeper; a cell wall to provide protection and maintain the plant's form; chloroplasts to enable photosynthesis and make the plant green; cytoplasm to hold everything together; mitochrondrion to produce energy; a nucleus to control everything; ribosomes to build proteins; an endoplasmic reticulum (mnemonic: rectum), which are tunnels to transport stuff; vacuoles to store water and do something else (?); and the gogli body, which I can't remember what that does.
We could also talk about sedimentary, igneous, and metaphoric rock cycles, the pH scale, balancing chemical equations, and the fact that while protons and neutrons stick together in the nucleus, electrons (which are much lighter, by the way) spin around the nucleus at the equivalent of three football fields away! Or we could talk about heterozygous genotypes and dominant and recessive genes, and why every single person in our family can roll his or her tongue and I can't (which makes me seriously annoyed!).
We could talk about the ocean floor, the solar system (mnemonic: "My Very Educated Mother Just Swam Upstream Naked." Can you believe I got to be the mnemonic for the planets?), gravity and mass, and how I should probably move to the moon, where I'd only weigh 1/6 of what I weigh on earth though my mass would be the same. We could talk about the taxonomic ranks: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species (mnemonic: King Phillip Can't Organize Family Games, Stupid).
We could talk about all these things because Eli, Amanda, and I have been studying this stuff for the past eight months.
Back story, in Utah (and most other states, I think), elementary education majors have to pass a series of four tests to demonstrate their basic knowledge of language arts, social studies, science, and math before they graduate. Eli passed these basic tests without too much difficulty; however, the State of Idaho requires even more. Elementary Ed majors in Idaho must choose an area of emphasis (one of those four subjects), take a couple upper-level classes in that field of study, and then pass a much more difficult Praxis test in that field.
Because Eli attended BYU-Idaho, and for some reason I will never understand, he chose science as his emphasis. He took a geology class and botany class his very last semester, and with no more preparation than that, faced the daunting prospect of the higher-level science Praxis.
[Think scary music, which makes you frightened before you even know what's happening.]
Thus began the saga of courage and resilience I mentioned earlier. Through the course of a year and a half, Eli sat for this three-hour test six different times. His score increased each time, but until the sixth try, it was never high enough to pass. May I just say right here that the questions are ridiculously hard for a non-science major. My goodness! Also, the test sets people up for failure. Each time you take it, it includes entirely different questions, so you never know what to expect. The second you finish and push "submit," your score pops up, but you can't ever find out which questions you got right or which ones you missed. Some questions require information from the periodic table, but you're not allowed to have one of those, so unless you happen to have it memorized.....
I could go on about just how much I hate this test. I won't.
Many people would have quit long before they reached Attempt #6. Not Eli. Was he discouraged? Yes. Frustrated? Absolutely. Did he want to give up? Multiple times. But he had a goal, a goal for which he had invested nine semesters of hard work, a goal to be an elementary teacher, and the only thing standing in the way of that goal was this stupid test (which, trust me, won't help him in any way teach 2nd or 3rd graders).
He persevered. I realize this is total mom brag goop, but honestly, I can only stand in awe of his determination to overcome an obstacle that, after the fifth try, felt insurmountable. We had worked so hard that time, studying most nights, reviewing practice questions. And still he came up six points shy. At that point, we felt we had done all we could on our own; we needed a real science teacher (rather than an English teacher mom) to help. Lucky for us, we knew one of those! Shulamith's husband's mom, Dawn, is a career middle school science teacher. We had no idea how awesome a teacher she was, but we sure know now.
Eli and Amanda went to Dawn's home every week for six weeks for private tutoring. She wrote science concepts on large rolls of newsprint as she broke down complex ideas and then explained them to Eli with clarity and precision. Then he and Amanda came home, and every night, Eli came upstairs and taught me what he learned that week. That's why I know all that stuff.
Yesterday, Eli sat for the science Praxis for the sixth and (thanks to Dawn) last time. He passed!! With unwavering determination, he challenged what seemed an impossible obstacle and overcame it. He will finish student teaching in another month, making him a certified teacher. By fall, he will likely have his own classroom.
And I will never again have to look at a diagram of a plant cell.
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