Tests, tests, tests -- I hate tests!  As a student, I hated tests.  As a teacher, I hated tests!  You want me to quantify learning?

A test is really a tool for the teacher, not a measurement of the student.  The results of the test tell the teacher what the student has learned and what the student hasn't quite gotten yet, so that the teacher can try a different strategy with the material. 

But tests have gotten turned around -- grades matter, not applied learning, not problem-solving skills.  You can't get government money from demonstrated learning, only in the improvement of math scores.  No one's learning anything because they seek grades, not knowledge. 

Let's start "fixing" the education system with tweeking the philosophy. 

As I have often said, I wouldn't want to have surgery performed on me by a doctor who couldn't check the book.

There has to be a balance of memorizing fundamentals, and being tested on our memory and understanding of them, along with learning how to resolve any problem using appropriate resources.

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I agree that LEARNING is an import part of developing our brain skills. But TESTING is just a way of making nervous wrecks and/or failures out of people like me. I "don't test well," a phrase that has come into common parlance, but did not exist in all the years I was in school. It occurred to almost no one that someone like me, who did poorly on tests, might just have a problem with the pressures of the testing system. (I have trouble to this day filling out forms. Put a blank form in front of me, and I will forget my own name.)

SIDEBAR: I'm pretty sure I have mentioned this before. When I was in 12th grade, a group of guidance counselors from the different high schools around Calgary put together a program based on the assumption that seemingly bright kids who did poorly on tests might do well in a university environment. If they were allowed to "graduate" without having actually achieved the required grades, they might very well flourish in the realms of higher education, where they would be more properly stimulated.

A pool of 12 students was eventually chosen, thru arcane methods that I do not fully understand to this day. From the various high schools were selected eleven girls -- and me! My father was over the Moon! His son was going to university!

Then it turned out those guidance counselors had not bothered to run their idea past the Powers That Were at the University of Alberta. And when they did, after all our hopes had been raised, those Powers said NO WAY. Students would be admitted to the UofA only if they had passed all the proper tests!

End of that brilliant idea!

To add insult to injury, to tell our parents that the 12 of us would not be going to university after all, the schools sent out a form letter, apologizing, and using terms like "son/daughter" and "he/she." When I read the letter, I was appalled. "Really?" I said. "It was eleven girls and me! They couldn't type TWO letters??"

(Consider a Path Not Taken: If I HAD gone to UofA, instead of ACA, there would not have come a day when Ron Moppett, the Gallery director, came to me and said "I'm bringing in a show of comic book art. I want you to do a comic book as the brochure.")