When I woke up on a Monday, I groaned at the thought of facing another week of school and trying to get through another Monday. Then, I remembered that it was PARCC week. Suddenly, my entire body felt like it was stuck to the bed; I simply refused to get out of the bed and go take three days worth of PARCC tests. Finally, after convincing myself that the testing would go by and that spring break would come soon, I got out of bed.
As I’m sure was true for every student, I dreaded PARCC. Somehow, every reading I had to do was on the most boring topic; I had one article to read and answer questions about the shape of a soccer ball and how it affects the overall use of the ball. Everything was uninteresting. After I read, answered, and wrote, I finished with at least a half an hour left. Like many other people in my testing room, I ended up doodling on my paper for a half an hour, sometimes longer if I had finished earlier. I remember some kids in my testing room tried to fall asleep after they were finished with their test. After PARCC, we had a block schedule for the rest of the day, which interrupted a majority of class time. We had half of our classes on the first day, then the next half of our classes on the next day. This repeated throughout the week. In many classes, my teachers did not want to start a new lesson, fearing that their students might forget what they learned after not having class for a day. In addition, there were many times that I was confused what class to go to and often found myself in the wrong room.
I have Mr. Du for English this year and for class one day, Mr. Du decided to tell us his tips for PARCC, as well as some of his opinions. As he pulled up the screen to the first practice test that was on the website, Mr. Du started to explain the use of the tools located at the top of the screen. He started to explain the usefulness of the answer eliminator tool, then says, “This would be useful if you didn’t have the option to eliminate all of the answer options,” while demonstrating that you could eliminate all the answer choices then move onto the next question. Next, he moved onto stating that the notepad tool. When you are writing an essay during PARCC, you can’t copy and paste quotes from the passage, however you can copy and paste from the notepad into the text submission box, but there is almost little use for this feature if you cannot copy and paste quotes into your essay. Another tool that Mr. Du told us about was the line reader tool, that only shows you one line of text as you are reading; saying that for some it might help focus while they’re reading however, for most, because of the tool only allowing you to read one line at a time, which would take you an hour to read the article, he advised us not to use this tool. Mr. Du then proceeded to give us a tip for the PARCC; if you change the background color to a creme color, then you will be able to focus more on what you are reading. However, he again said that this tool because of the fact that you can change the background to purple. Even though everyone dreads PARCC, I did remember to take Mr. Du’s advice, and I changed the background to creme.
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