How Do They Decide if You Can Be a Teacher? With a Test, of Course

This weekend I had to take a state exam. I showed up at the testing location thinking this would be a fairly simple procedure, but to my surprise there were hundreds, easily a thousand, teaching candidates waiting in a line that wrapped itself around the building. We were all herded in, only identified by the number on our admission paperwork, and directed to various rooms where our tests were passed out and one universal set of instructions were read over the intercom to the entire facility.
For the first 3 ½ hours, I was feeling pretty good, excited because this is the first official step on the road to becoming a teacher. I finally am in the last month of completing my general education and will be moving into the nitty gritty (that’s what I like to call my education courses). But by the last hour and a half I panicked. I still had a 4 page essay to write and the entire math section. I turned my test in 30 seconds before the “put your pencils down” announcement. I’m confident I passed, won’t know for about a month, but it didn’t seem very difficult, just long and mentally strenuous.
As I sat for five hours in an ergonomically incorrect desk and chair combo, my arm, hand and wrist feeling arthritic from the constant grip of the pencil and slowly losing the feeling in my right leg, I couldn’t help but think that this is just not natural, and it’s not an effective way of determining one's academic capabilities. At some point my focus shifted from the test to the multitude of sensations occurring in my body. There was no time or opportunity for a break, they don’t allow you to get up and walk around. Studies have already shown that the brain needs intervals of rest, it’s not designed to focus on one thing for several hours straight. How can students be expected to perform their best under those conditions?
Maybe some day we will have some educational leadership that will recognize that the results that the states want on tests, to prove that their students are more educated than another state’s students, or that the US is more educated than China or whatever it is exactly that they are trying to prove by forcing students to take so many tests, are not going to come from making students to sit in unnatural positions for ridiculous periods of time to the point where their brain can no longer function in an efficient manner. Sometimes it’s good to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes to get an accurate portrayal of what they go through. I did that this weekend with my test, but I wonder if the people responsible for requiring state testing in schools ever have to take standardized tests themselves. Maybe we should put them under annual testing requirements and see what happens.