Less demanding routes begin in AP courses at TCS after the highly anticipated exams, and students are now working on more laid back and diverse activities during class time.

After almost 10 months of restless work studying for the exams, students are now focusing on projects, assignments from other classes or are spending their time relaxing and having fun.

“We really studied very hard all year and worked our butts off to pass the exam, so we deserve these weeks of rest and reward,” explains Maria Antonia Aristizabal, junior taking AP Chemistry.  

The goal for many AP courses right now is to have a planned activity for students’ class time while allowing them freedom to work on something they enjoy. For example, the AP Biology class already completed a project in which students chose any topic related to bio and presented to the rest of the class.

“Now that they are done with the projects, we are going to go on a nature walk, take pictures and classify different plants and animals that we find. We are finally going to do a little bit of nomenclature in class,” added Bill Beauchamp, AP Biology teacher about how they are going to spend class time the rest of the year.

Additionally, the AP Calculus course is known as one of the most demanding and strict classes in TCS and they worked extremely hard the entire year in order to learn all the material needed for the AP exam. Due to this, the course teacher, Kassie Smith, decided to make these last few weeks for her students fun and relaxing by giving them free class time.

“Now we can do whatever we want. We watch movies, play video games, work on assignments for other classes, or just hang out with out peers,” said Valeria Ochoa, TCS Junior taking AP Calculus.

However, even though the AP English course is taking a break from the rigorous writing assignments they had been working on to study for the exam, they are still using their time in class to work on a required research project for the curriculum.

“The project is a powerpoint presentation on a general topic such as death or violence, where students organize it into 20 slides and each is on a timer. They can’t have a lot of text and the grade is based mostly on their visual representations,” explains David Gold, AP English teacher.

It is no secret that Advanced Placement courses are the biggest challenge for most juniors and seniors at our school, and students are grateful that some of their teachers reward all their effort to excel in the exam with a more enjoyable and diverse class time these last weeks of school.  

As added by Maria Antonia Aristizabal, “AP courses require so much effort and dedication for the majority of the year, and it brings a lot of satisfaction to finally be done with something that took so much energy and discipline.”