Fun While Mommy Suffers

I have to take both the Subject Area and the General GRE. If you don't know what these torturous things are, they are tests that are supposedly designed to predict your potential success in a graduate program. Generally, people who have just graduated with an undergraduate degree take these tests before applying for a Master's Degree. There are a wide number of schools that have totally done away with looking at these scores because they are both not accurate at predicting a student's knowledge, and they are unnecessary. CSULB didn't require a score for admittance to its MA program, so I never took it. Everywhere I'm looking to apply for a PhD requires both the General (think: basic college level math and reading comprehension, etc) and the Subject Area (think: literally EVERY major work of literature and criticism from Beowulf to the present) test scores.

Since I have not studied anything outside of Medieval Lit, with any real focus, since I was about 21, the Subject Area is pretty much going to flay me. I only had a few days to devote to studying for it. By the way, how do you study for that? Start at the Bible, and read everything written since then? Seriously? It's really, really hard to study for. The first practice test I took, before I studied, I got a score that placed me in the 5th percentile. No kidding. You read that right: 5. I used a practice book and pure rote memorization and got up to 50th in two days, on a different test. So, hopefully, I did okay. We'll see. Anyway, I'm sure I'll be taking that bad boy again. It's notoriously hard. People usually take it two to three times to get above 50.

Anyway, that's what I did on Saturday morning. I had to go to Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg (which, by the way, is gorgeous), and sit in a stuffy room, for three hours and try to remember all of the works of every major British Author since 500 A.D (ETS--the GRE administrators-- pretends to care about American authors too, but they really don't, and only throw in a token question or two about the Harlem Renaissance or about Transcendentalism).

While I was suffering through multiple choice, this is what my darling family endured.

Looks like torture, right?

A water gun fight. Collin says he won. He also refused to put a shirt on the rest of the day.