Testing...A...B...C...or...D?

...I before E, except after C...

Remember the good old days when you just couldn’t wait to get out of school just so that you would never have to take a test ever again in your life?

Yeah, me too. 

I’m pretty sure that we all figured that once we were all out of school we would never have to study again. 

No more pencils.

No more books.

No more teacher’s dirty looks. 

You know how the song goes.

I thought that never another homework assignment would cross my doorstep.

Surprisingly(?), was I wrong.

Since starting my career out to sea, it has been... 

Classes for this. School for that. License for this. Certificate for that. Classes. Lectures. Demonstrations. Simulations. Practices. Reading assignments. Drawings. Regulatory mandates. Note taking. Yearly renewals. Bi-annually renewals. Five-year renewals. Endorsements galore.

Grade school had nothing on becoming a Citizen Sailor.

Just the other day I took, yet again, another test.

This time I finished taking the multiple exams that is required for upgrading my Merchant Mariners License to Master of 1600 Tons/Oceans. 

Back in the day when licenses looked cool.

Not a fan of the new license booklet.

It has been a long time since I had to take a license exam. 

Too long, in fact. 

I actually had to study. 

I couldn’t rely on the knowledge that I had forced into my brain way back in the college days. 

I had to hit the books and hit them hard. Or hit the computer mouse and arrow keys as it were. 

Times are a changing. Seems as though today’s kiddos aren’t the only ones studying with an iPad or a laptop.

Not surprisingly, the tests were pretty challenging. I had forgotten a lot about GM, righting moments, how to figure out the change in the Metacentric Height and the effects on a vessel's buoyancy. Not to mention a multitude of other things I knew all so well almost two decades ago.

But I passed.

And I’m excited about that. 

Apparently, you can teach old horse new tricks. Or at the very least make him remember stuff that he knew many, many tides ago. 

So Master of 1600 Ton/Oceans is in the books.

And it feels good.

As an added bonus, I didn’t have to argue with my kids that they had to go do their homework. 

Because Dad had to go do his too.