Does Testing Make You Nervous? 

    When I was in high school in the early-to-mid 2000's, standardized testing was a thing I am sure, the problem is that I can only talk about my experience with the ACT because that is the only kind that I had to take. I had such extreme text anxiety that I started taking the ACT in the 9th grade and took it at least once a year until I graduated in order to work on my test taking skills and anxiety more than anything. Even though I have always prepared the best I could for tests, they are just scary to me. 

    By the time it came to the pandemic I was not in school myself yet and a mom of three, so my learning experience was more along the lines of how best to educate children while surviving the crazy world around me. We decided to homeschool the kids in order to try and keep our family as safe as possible for as long as possible. I had one kid in 4th grade, one in 2nd grade, and a 3-year-old, all while trying to keep them and the husband safe and away from the scary virus. After one year of homeschooling, I decided that they needed to go back to school but in order to get back in they had to take a standardized test to "place them" even though they knew where they would need to be. 

    One of my children inherited my extreme test anxiety. She struggles with test, homework, anytime she's behind on something, all of it. I will forever be her support and try and help her in any way I can. Testing is also very different now then it was when I was taking tests in the mid-2000's. Not just testing has changed but life was changed forever with the pandemic, our children will forever be affected by that time in our lives that we lived through. Survived through.