Reply to Anyone else think it's ridiculous for kids to take AP classes?

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[quote=Anonymous]Take all AP classes if possible. There are good teachers and very very bad teachers.

The best teachers will usually be teaching AP classes.  An important key to learning is connecting the dots and making the content relevant to our lives.  Rather than thinking of data as isolated points of information it is far easier to understand and remember information if it is part of a sequence or holistic picture.

Quality teachers connect all of those dots with pre-existing knowledge (what we learned in past assignments) and casually alluding to future impacts on our lives today.

AP course content is more detailed (more facts), but the teachers are more engaged and better at connecting the dots.

Using history for example, an AP. US History teacher will teach you practically everything of major consequence that happened in virtually every year in US history. It's sounds monumental, but it's not.  It's not because it's a sequentially unfolding story that makes sense in its entirety, because it's a series of cause and effect stories.

In regular US History classes the assumption is that the students are either uninterested or unable to process that quantity of information.  The result of this teaching methodology is that students are taught primarily the major events in US history which translates into the wars, slavery, assassinations, and the civil rights movement.  All valid parts of history, but for the average student all disconnected events and all of which must be remembered as historical blobs floating in space with no chronology and no connection to their lives and personal realities.

I believe AP teachers are more fully engaged teaching their courses in a comprehensive way which in turn makes the material easier to learn and remember.

Good luck
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