Complaining about the workload in AP classes is common for the students who take them. It can be heard in the halls, seen through Facebook posts, and observed by the students who just mindlessly copy homework in the morning before their assignments are due. Whether it’s reading for AP Language or writing an essay for AP European History, the complaining never ends. In this process, they forget that while they have to spend one measly 50 minute class period to write one essay, the teacher has to spend hours and hours of time outside of class grading them. So why do teachers choose to teach these vigorous courses?
One of the bigger reasons is the environment that naturally comes with teaching college-level classes. For the most part, while you can have a fun time in AP classes, they are focused more on the material, leaving less time for distractions. The students are often geared more toward the goal of passing the AP exam at the end of the year in order to get a college credit and saving the money that the course would cost.
“The kids are wonderful, and are usually more diligent and responsible than my other classes,” said Kristen Crosby, who teaches both AP Seminar and English II Honors. Although, sometimes that isn’t the case, because the students simply don’t care about the material of the class.
“Hopefully the students are more mature considering the class, but that isn’t always the case, especially when students take the class only to boost their GPA,” said AP Literature teacher Kathleen Syron, who has been teaching AP classes since 1999. She also brings up the troubles of gifted children, who are more inclined to take the rigorous classes.
“Often times gifted children are harder to teach because they think they know it all already, and they get frustrated if they have to put in too much effort.” Both types of students bring a hindrance to the classroom, but overall, they should be more focused on getting that college credit.
The classes do require a ton of grading written responses rather than the standard multiple choice only that other classes use. This is due to the fact that the AP exams have both multiple choice and some kind of written part, such as Free Response Questions, Document Based Questions and Short Answers. On average, according to Mrs. Syron, it takes seven hours to score 175 essays and 25 hours to grade them. That’s 25 hours of a teacher’s version of homework every two weeks. However, it is a necessary part of being able to teach these classes. Being able to evaluate student performances is crucial to being successful as a teacher so students, in turn, can also be successful on the test.
Teachers have more work to do and often have to deal with complaining slackers, so the golden question is: why teach AP classes?
“It can be overwhelming… but if you approach it as discovering new cultures, societies and concepts, it’s an adventure. As lame as that sounds, it’s true,” said AP Art History teacher Kyle Wolf, who is in his second year of teaching AP Art History, and his first year of teaching AP 2D Portfolio. All in all, it seems that teachers teach these tough classes because it provides them a challenge and to learn new things about their subject along the way.
Britt Stone // Graphic Department
