As a public school educator for the last eight years, I have seen a growing trend in the education world that, in my opinion, is stifling the creativity of our classroom teachers, not to mention our students.  It probably won't come as a surprise that teachers are struggling to effectively teach their subject material within the confines of a multiple choice-style culminating evaluation such as the SOLs or Standards of Learning.  These bubble-sheet tests have become the definition of a teacher's merit in public education.  And how a student performs on these monotonous tests has become the definition of a student's ability to learn. Here's is my complaint (one of many):  Teachers are feeling so pressured to teach the material to the students in a way that will ensure a certain score on these tests that they are often forced to sacrifice teaching their students to actually be able to DO something.  In my high school physics class we concluded the year by having the Physics Olympics.  We had to use all of our knowledge base and skills to compete in the events such as Vector Croquet.  Now you just have to be able to work out equations on paper and narrow your answer down to the most logical, then guess.   This type of learning (or regurgitation as it may be) is great for kids who have a good memory or are lucky guessers but what about those kids who learn by doing?  Yes, Hands-On activities are encouraged in public schools but only when time allows and only after kids have proven a certain level of proficiency in the bubble sheet tests.  I think we are doing our kids, our teachers, and our futures a disservice by not encouraging creativity in the classroom from all participants.  We will find ourselves with a generation of folks who know ABOUT a lot of things but who don't know how to DO anything.