Testimony to the New Jersey State Board of Education from Jordan Barron (age 14) about how the new PARCC exams are the most stressful things Ive done in school. Hello, New Jersey Board of Education members. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my concerns and suggestions. My name is Jordan Barron and I’m a Freshman at Mahwah High School in Mahwah, NJ. To be honest, I’m extremely confused as to why Common Core has been accepted by you as the learning standard here in New Jersey. In my school, we are offered an “elective” (which we cannot choose but rather are placed into) called College and Career Readiness. This class is titled to sound as if it’s preparing me for life. However, this class is just making me work on math problems I’ve already completed in my Algebra class and occasionally (without warning) taking the PARCC practice exam. On a side note, have any of you Board members ever taken that exam to see what it’s like? Well, it’s the most stressful thing I’ve done in school. I would like the Board members to draw a parentheses, square root exponent on a piece of paper….that was easy, right? With the PARCC practice exam, we can’t write down the equation because the test is taken on a computer. The buttons to accomplish these mathematical operations are scattered about and difficult to find and then when we finally click it and “write” out the equation, we’ve wasted 10-15 minutes of test time. In fact, it’s so convoluted that my class had to be given a lesson on accomplishing these operations. A 55-minute class for “writing” square roots, parentheses, exponents and so on… washingtonpost/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/01/14/teen-the-parcc-common-core-test-is-the-most-stressful-thing-ive-done-in-school/
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 23:38:53 +0000