AP classes overwork students

Oh AP classes, what a bittersweet relationship I have with them… From the loving, nurturing embrace of knowledge, to the despair and fear of three essays and a formative lab report being due on the same day, AP classes are roller coasters of ups and downs, knowledge and work.

During all my years of schooling — up until now — I hadn’t really been faced with an academic challenge anywhere near the level of AP classes. Before I took AP classes, I was used to going home and relaxing, but now with harder classes, I’m used to going home, doing 100 AP chemistry problems, and writing three essays for AP English, every… Single… Night. On top of that, I have homework in all my other classes, but even with three other classes, the two AP classes I take outweigh the workload of the others a thousand times over.

Although there’s an excessive amount of work, there’s also an excessive amount of learning that comes with it. A lot of it is very useful information that I’ll most likely use for the rest of my life, for example, how to use semicolons and colons. On the other hand, there’s some information that I might not use every day and is quite obscure, like that the Ka of acetic acid is 1.8 x 10^-5, or no more than 40 terms about rhetorical analysis.

Albeit, some of the knowledge isn’t always practical, it still provides a welcomed challenge. The problem solving skills that come from the challenges are well worth the grey hairs and all-nighters that come from it. Ultimately, these skills will be useful in one way or another for the rest of my life, whether I use these skills in college, the workplace, or anywhere else for that matter.