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.