After work last night, Caleb and I drove down to his high school for Advanced Placement Night. He's already taking honors classes and getting straight As, so both the school and Christene and I feel he would benefit from the AP classes.
The presentation was fairly straight forward. Mr. Reid gave a presentation about what the AP courses are and what students should expect, both out of the class and to put into the class.
Students will likely have a few hours additional work per day and required summer projects. But the benefits, college credits during high school, make it worth while.
After the presentation, Caleb and I visit the tables for the AP classes in which he's initially interested (US History, Chemistry, Biology, Calculus and Physics) to get their descriptions. The program also provided him with a road map of what honors classes he'll need to take prior to each of the classes. Then we sat and read, then discussed, the course descriptions.
From what I read it appears that the AP Physics class would cover a first semester Physics class, AP Chemistry would be Chem 1 & 2, AP Calculus would be a full Calculus program, and AP Biology would cover BIO 1 and most of BIO 2.
He's going to be in a good position to enter university given what's available, with most of his first year courses out of the way via AP classes.
The presentation was fairly straight forward. Mr. Reid gave a presentation about what the AP courses are and what students should expect, both out of the class and to put into the class.
Students will likely have a few hours additional work per day and required summer projects. But the benefits, college credits during high school, make it worth while.
After the presentation, Caleb and I visit the tables for the AP classes in which he's initially interested (US History, Chemistry, Biology, Calculus and Physics) to get their descriptions. The program also provided him with a road map of what honors classes he'll need to take prior to each of the classes. Then we sat and read, then discussed, the course descriptions.
From what I read it appears that the AP Physics class would cover a first semester Physics class, AP Chemistry would be Chem 1 & 2, AP Calculus would be a full Calculus program, and AP Biology would cover BIO 1 and most of BIO 2.
He's going to be in a good position to enter university given what's available, with most of his first year courses out of the way via AP classes.
Wow, our high school didn't have a presentation! Fancy.
ReplyDeleteI think I took every AP class I could except chemistry, but they didn't really offer a ton of classes, so that doesn't mean much. I took U.S. History. (I suck at history but the teacher that year was an "N" which made all the difference in the world for me. I was one of the 2 kids that got a 5 on the test from our class. Woot!), American Lit, and Calculus AB. I think it all counted as 12 credits for me when I got to U of M. So it was like I had gotten a semester out of the way, except that I still ended up going a full 4 years plus one summer session.
The only one of those that I was really glad I had taken was calculus because it meant that I was offset from all of the other freshman. There were herds and herds of people in Calc 101 when I was in 102 (or whatever they called it). And I think that taking a full year to learn the foundations of calculus helped a ton in being able to handle it at the faster college pace in the later classes.
The other two classes really made no difference to my college life. But I enjoyed the classes in high school. We had some great AP teachers. Some of them retired right after my year and my sister got stuck with teachers that didn't have a clue. I was really fortunate that way.