This comic portrays the top person confused in class with a lot of homework to do after vs. bottom person learning productively in class and thriving academically. Collage courtesy of senior Cassiopeia Mamaradlo.
A San Luis Obispo High School experience isn’t complete without the worries and complaints of certain classes floating throughout campus. While most of the world welcomes April with joy because of spring, SLOHS students dread the fact it also means AP season. With AP exams coming up on May 6 and May 7, it’s imperative that the seminar classes for these advanced placement subjects truly suit the student’s needs!
While it’s obvious that most of the core studying happens at home and in the student’s free time, it’s also important to note that the time spent at school should be just as productive.
“We should get all the coursework done in the two trimesters because the AP class I’m taking right now, we were still reading chapters into the [seminar]. My class does one test every week but it still feels like I have to do them on the weekends, and have to read, and do the worksheets,” said sophomore Zoe Fujii.
There’s a common pattern when it comes to AP students’ concern about seminar classes, and it’s the fact that vital time gets inefficiently spent on non-exam specific work. So many test problems can be covered in one period but insteads students are expected to learn new material in one hour and then go home to study alone for a test they’ve never taken.
“I personally feel like in a lot of my AP classes, it’s been like we’re trying to catch up on material we haven’t learned and we have less time to actually do practice test…the stuff that we’ve done in class is helpful, but I do also feel like a lot of students have to take that burden with them at home,” said junior Talia Ramezani.
Numerous studies have shown that the best way to prepare students for real exams is practice exams. Thus, more time in class should be spent familiarizing students with AP exam type questions so that they are not overwhelmed by AP classrooms’ odd way of rephrasing questions so that they are more confusing than they need to be.
“[The classes] are teaching us whole new topics, which I get because it’s like a trimester system, but more review rather than learning new material would be more helpful…but I think all my teachers have done a good job preparing us so far,” said senior Zoe Elliot.
Of course, seminar teachers are nevertheless doing their best job to help students excel at the upcoming tests. But it’s inevitably a stressful process, which is why grading in the third trimester classes should be more lax and not constraining. Students deserve to direct their focus and energy into the important college credit exams rather than transcript permanent grades.
Although most teachers are basing their seminar curriculum on student’s needs, it would make the third trimester review classes more stress-free and productive if all units were finished and grades were low maintenance by the last trimester.
Tigers, how great would it be if the time spent in class actually left us more confident and driven to study rather than confused and overwhelmed by homework?
