I'm a child of public schools. Texas, California and New South Wales, Australia. To help pay for college, I took a position as a math tutor for  TAAS (what Texas then called its standardized testing program).

I think the public school system doesn't get it right.

Now, let me also say that I'm a HUGE proponent of public schools. They do a very good job of teaching children basic concepts upon which the kids can build. Many - if not most - of the teachers who work there daily are excellent and truly care about providing each child with these basic skills.

But the testing that we as a nation have set as the benchmark for our educational system is ridiculous. Passing a standardized test does not tell me a child is capable of learning to read, understand basic math or science or has any level of creativity. Passing a standardized test means simply the child got more multiple choice bubbles right on the ScanTron. For some kids, that's simply good guessing.

For some children, testing of any kind causes them to freeze. That results in very poor performance on that test. Other students are great at memorization and can remember the answers long enough to take the test. Still others stumble over certain concepts because of a question they don't understand. Quite frankly, I think none of these actually helps kids learn. I mean really, truly learn and apply that knowledge to other disciplines and moments in life.

And isn't that what we're supposed to be teaching? I want my children to want to learn - I want them to ask difficult questions and miss obvious answers. I want them to be engaged in the learning process. Because then they will take something intangible away from each lesson: they will take curiosity. They will want to come back and learn something new. They will apply that knowledge and build from it.

I understand that some aspects of learning will always be rote: sight words like "a" and "the" are best learned through memorization. Same goes with the multiplication table. It's a boring way to learn, but it's necessary. What I don't get is why we need to teach our kids history, science and even math that way. Wouldn't it be more interesting to show just how much math there is in music and art? What about a re-creating a court of law for high school students instead of having them read about the procedures in a government textbook?

We know kids do better when they explore the outdoors, so take more field trips to a local garden to teach botany and horticulture. The best case scenario would be for the kids to walk to that garden and get some exercise along with a lesson.

My point is that there are better, more engaged methods for teaching concepts. Ones that kids would be pretty open to exploring. And I think teachers would appreciate not being stymied by the unreachable goal of improving standardized test scores year after year (do we really, honestly think 100 percent of students will pass these tests)?

I want my kids to want to learn. Let's have a discussion about how make that happen. My guess is that most schools would improve their overall scores if we engaged the students in the learning process. It's the kids' education, after all. Shouldn't they have some say in how they're being taught?