I did my maths test again today. And I passed

Yes folks, I am operating at GCSE level maths again

I dunno, I can write correctly normalised databases straight out of my head, I can code hideously complex software. I even once managed to write a fractal generator. But none of that is hard compared to “You are organising a school trip. There are 32 students, 8 of which have paid £2.50. What is the proportion of students who have not paid? Express this in its lowest common denominator… you have 18 seconds and cannot use a calculator”.

These questions were obviously not written by real teachers. Real teachers have no need to quickly calculate anything in their heads. When asked a maths question the response is “work it out yourself and I’ll come back in five minutes”

Some of the questions were pretty easy, some I went “Err wtf?” and just waited for it to time me out. Some were actually quite ambiguous and took me a few minutes to understand!

I had spare time to review my answers at the end and in the final 30 seconds remembered how to complete a question I’d missed out. Cue lots of frantic scribbling and thinking as the timer ticked down. I had a James Bond moment and just managed to get the answer in before the timer expired

It’s one less thing I have to do again in my life. I like that. It’s also one more of my sacred Teaching Standards that I have completed. They are a little like XBLA achievements, but instead of gaining them by kicking people in the head or doing a forward flip they are achieved by “taking into account the students’ social, moral and ethnic backgrounds” and other teachery stuff.