Some 17 years ago, I got my teaching credential. Two observations: 1. The test was ridiculously easy. Junior high–level math and reading. And yet teacher cand

Some 17 years ago, I got my teaching credential. Two observations: 1. The test was ridiculously easy. Junior high–level math and reading. And yet teacher candidates still failed it. 2. For K-12 teaching, the knowledge that was tested was pretty much irrelevant for the job. What matters for more than being able to find the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle or to comprehend an expository paragraph (which is not to say that these aren't useful skills) is the ability to manage a classroom. Almost none of the teacher prep I had was geared towards that single most important skill (which I, unfortunately, was not so great at) and which is what will make the difference between succeeding and failing in a K-12 teaching career. I think this generalizes to other fields as well. Think about all the tree-traversal BS we've all gone through in a software engineer interview and how little that relates to the actual work that we do and how the hard stuff is much less the programming and more the learning the code base and business.