The AP Craze
Public high school students are overloading their already-packed schedules with Advanced Placement classes, galore. But is the stressful workload worth the outcome?
My junior year of high school has come to a whirring end, yet the comfortable feeling of summer sun on my face ceases to melt away my school year stresses. As I lounge on the beach with my senior-to-be colleagues, the opaque shielding of an AP-loaded education keeps me from chit-chatting about nothing and feeling totally carefree. As a beach read, Gossip Girl has been replaced by Camus. I’m forever an AP nerd.
Let’s be realistic. I’m forever a drama queen, too. Where my year was comprised of US history cram sessions and monotonous essay readings in the “Norton Reader”, I managed to find time for friendship, leadership, and of course, Glee watching. My meager two AP courses were a cakewalk in comparison to the three or four that many of my friends conquered. And my mere four all-nighters are nothing when I juxtapose them to the nonexistent sleep schedules of my AP Calculus-obsessing acquaintances.
“There were a lot of nights where I did not go to bed until 3 am,” incoming Cypress Bay senior, Max Kushner, informed me despairingly. Max took four AP courses on the block scheduling system while balancing dual-enrollment at Broward College this past semester. The stress that APs place upon the shoulders of students today is overwhelming and detrimental to our health. Kira Helman, a shining survivor of four AP classes, informed me that stress and lack of sleep from her workload led her to become “irritable, lethargic, and stressed.” With three to four hours of sleep nightly and mounds of homework to plow through, Kira tells me, “I got headaches, dark circles under my eyes, a decreased appetite, and a caffeine addiction.” Similar conditions for fellow AP scholar, Joelle Garcia, led her pediatrician to lecture her sternly on the evils of “over-doing it” in school.
AP courses are quite the Catch-22. Health and social life are put into jeopardy, yet an extra AP is the GPA inflation device that will save a student from drowning in the dream school admissions office. And despite late nights and meltdowns, many teens (including myself) find the experience gained from Advanced Placement classes to be worth the while. In theory, AP classes are both vital and necessary for the success of students. “AP English was life-changing for me,” Garcia claims. And Kushner feels that being consumed by AP’s was worth his while because, as he puts it, “I earned college credits, surrounded myself with intellectual people, (and) was challenged to think outside the box.” On another note, Helman says, “I spread myself too thin. While I did achieve academic success, I feel that I would have been a lot healthier and happier had I only taken one or two (AP courses) as opposed to four.”
My advice? APs are inevitable. Therefore, you may as well take higher level courses in areas of interest. And by this I mean, don’t overload your schedule just to inflate a GPA; take the Advanced Placement courses that you won’t mind devoting a good chunk of your year to. And don’t get too overwhelmed. You will survive your schedule!
By: Alli Weiss