With AP testing officially almost three weeks over, each teacher seems to handle the last month of school a bit differently. While some are continuing to give end-of-year finals and exams, other teachers are letting their students relax or learn in new and fun ways that the AP curriculum couldn’t do. So, let’s dive a little deeper into what different classes are doing now that the AP testing season is over.
AP World History, taught by Mr. Morgan, is a sophomore class at the school and for many students, the first experience taking an AP course and test. Although this is Mr. Morgan’s last year teaching as he will be moving to Japan in the summer, he hasn’t quit teaching yet. With the AP test over, Mr. Morgan introduced a project for his students to work on in pairs or groups of three. Students were required to create a presentation covering a global issue and a proposed solution for the issue, but with only $1 billion. Examples of presentations include global warming issues, wars, and pollution. As the presentations come to an end, Mr. Morgan plans on starting a different, more craftier project involving creating pop-out books for each of the nine units covered in the course. In the last few days of school, he will give a multiple-choice final.
In Mr. Hill’s AP biology class, many students have found themselves relaxing after a stressful year of hard and fast-paced learning. Now that AP testing is over, Mr. Hill has been introducing labs and activities, such as frog dissections, that students were unable to do earlier in the year. Mr. Hill also has given students the opportunity to create their own experiments and develop lab write-ups about them.
In AP U.S History, taught by Mrs. Dobeck, students continue to learn, just without any of the past stress. As one of Mrs. Dobeck’s students, Abhinav Mederametla said, “Those of us who took the AP test got the liberty of just learning history without added pressure.”
With the AP test over, students started off by watching the movie Forrest Gump which while it was entertaining, also provided much information about U.S history such as the Cold War and Vietnam War. Moving on, they began to learn about modern day historical events such as new technology, pop culture, and politics. “A main part of our focus has been about political events after Ronald Reagan’s death,” Mederametla said, “We are also learning about more serious events, like the attacks of September 11.”
While some classes continue to learn, others have become a period of socializing and relaxing. AP classes with many seniors in them, such as AP Calculus AB, have lessened the load, letting their students take a break in the last few weeks as the school year comes to a close. “We’re just doing some review for Calc BC,” Alec Nyberg said, “Other than that, there’s not much, just partying.”