I agree with LeeAnn’s post………why do we expect students to be a Jack of All Trades?  We force them to study all subjects in school, whether they are interested in them or not.  This is very unrealistic when it comes to the real world.  I have no interest in nursing and I would have most likely made very poor grades if I had been forced to sit through nursing classes in college.  In fact, I made straight A’s in all of my education classes, because I had such a strong desire to be a teacher and the classes just made sense to me, but classes such as physchology and philosophy were boring to me and I resented having to sit through them and therefore did not apply myself as much as I could have. 

What would happen if we quit focusing on “The Test” and focused on our students interest.  If we came in to school one day and gave every student a gator and let them subscribe to feeds they were interested in and then write about them?  Would we have more students that were truly gifted in areas instead of students that were just hard workers and made good grades?