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Thu | September 07, 2006

test anxiety is contagious

Department of Education

It's a trickle up effect of the No Child Left Behind Act. I think the new law mostly targets kids who can't read at all, but now everyone wants their kids to do better. Meanwhile, state tests have become more difficult. At least in NJ... the Grade Eight Proficiency Exam (GEPA) is taken over four days, for two hours a day.

Apparently it's been like this for several years. Back in the day, I took the progenitor of the GEPA... its name eludes me at the moment. But I don't remember it being difficult, or anyone stressing about it. In fact I never studied for state tests. They tested us every year starting from third grade, and I never got less than the 99th percentile, so I pretty much thought these tests were a joke. I mean I think sometimes I got lower scores than that, but there was never a question of not passing. And on these tests, all you really need to do is pass.

Now kids are like, barely passing the tests. Asian kids. And their Asian parents are getting worried. And keeping them as tutoring clients is like a confidence game, which I am neither great at playing nor inclined to do so. Mostly because I think being in a state of high stress and pressure is actually not good for performance. Especially on small children who don't really know how to handle the volume of stress that their adult parents are putting on them. I mean the amount of useless, unfocused anxiety I feel emanating from these parents is flabbergasting. I don't know what to do with it. They probably think I'm too relaxed or not serious enough.

Anyhow I've just spent like two hours navigating the disgusting DOE site and trying to download their pdfs on my slow connection, which should be fast but for some reason it's slow, for wi-fi setup reasons I don't understand. There is something about their website and this test that is making me hyperventilate. Like you have to look at diagrams of the water cycle. (Ugh, middle school!) But it's not even a normal diagram, it's some sort of kitchen sink model with a pan of water stacked on top of a pile of books, a tray with sand in it on a smaller, adjacent pile of books, and water flowing off the end, onto a pan on the table, with a lamp over it, distributing heat. And you're supposed to write a free response explanation of what's wrong with the model. Seriously I might have gotten that wrong.* But then again I'm not in eighth grade...

I had better stop before I get all nervous about it. I can feel myself totally getting frustrated about this whole thing, and all this time wasted on someone whose mother is wants to find a public school teacher to do it, because her friend told her that's what she did, and her kid was blah blah and blah.

I'll have to look at it some more some other day.

Also, the person who answers the phone at the Department of Education has got to be the most annoying person on the planet. Where do they find these people? He put me on hold like every two seconds, he had a pretentious, cloying accent, and he was purposely leading me to the wrong links then telling me to start over at the homepage again. After five minutes I hung up while I was on hold, thinking I'd find it faster myself. And I did.

609-633-6292. If you're raving drunk in the middle of the day and want to curse someone out, that is the number to call. Just ask for the guy with the infuriating accent.

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