Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests - not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.
One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.
There are two tests in life, more important than any other test. On Monday morning, when you wake up, do you feel in the pit of your stomach you can't wait to go to work? And when you're ready to go home Friday afternoon, do you say, 'I can't wait to go home?'
When you challenge other people's ideas of who or how you should be, they may try to diminish and disgrace you. It can happen in small ways in hidden places, or in big ways on a world stage. You can spend a lifetime resenting the tests, angry about the slights and the injustices. Or, you can rise above it.
We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.
August in sub-Saharan Los Angeles is one of the great and awful tests of one's endurance, sanity and stamina.
Although professors regard improving critical thinking as the most important goal of college, tests reveal that seniors who began their studies with average critical thinking skills have progressed only from the 50th percentile of entering freshmen to about the 69th percentile.
But I think my mistakes became the chemistry for my miracles. I think that my tests became my testimonies.
The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.
Scientists - who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests - figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced.