What do I care about?

How do I even begin to answer this vast prompt? There are many things I care about as an educator, as a as a future parent, and finally as a life-long learner. Where do I start from?

Since I am first and foremost an educator, here are the things I care most about:

• There are too many tests for students to take. Every day, co-workers are talking about data, data, data. Data does nothing but displays numbers. How does that compare to the student's personality or their strengths?
• Students are expected to sit and concentrate too long during the day. Students do have PE about twice a week and recess for 20 minutes. But for those other days, students only have 20 minutes of free time.
• The class size is too large in non-Title I schools. How can teachers personalize teaching to students with classes up to 33 students? 

As a future parent, I am worried about school being more academic and playtime is being substituted for more work. 

• I read an article about public schools vs. homeschooling. The mom whose kids were in public schools and taken out to be home schooled are now very successful in life. She took her children out of public school because social time was being minimized during the school day. Children were expected to only interact with each other during appropriate times of the day. They were only allowed to talk about school subjects during school hours except during the 20 minutes of recess.
• Another issue that concerns me are the reasons that prompts people into the education field. When I was an undergraduate student, all the other students who failed in their own major were encouraged to apply in the education field. Where does that leave America's future?
• As a future home-school parent, I can personalize the curriculum to match my child's intellectual abilities and let them create models and structures using items such as toothpicks and marshmallows as shown in the picture above. But in the classroom, teachers have limited budget provisions and cannot let students freely use toothpicks and marshmallows due to safety reasons.
• As a future parent, it seems there are only a handful of teachers who care about their students and how they learn. The other teachers in the school seems to just be collecting a paycheck and doing the minimum each month for their students. 

Finally, as a lifelong learner, I am concerned with those around me who seemed to have stopped learning because they seem to be stuck in a rut. I have a friend who does the same routine thing every day of the year. She wakes up, goes to work, goes home, eats dinner and goes to sleep. Day in and day out, there are new technologies being developed and new research being tested. Yet these things seem to fly over her head because she is stuck in survival mode.

As a person whose goal each day is to learn something new or discover something in a creative way, this is a very concerning matter for me. Even for those who do these routine things, I feel that each day something is happening in a special way. It's just not being recognized as being special. It just feels like the same old thing day in and day out.