Advanced Placement

It seems perfectly apt to me, after the end of a school year, to talk about AP classes. Good ole high school days, right?

My high school only generally allowed juniors and seniors to take AP courses (but even in junior high, people could take honors or pre-AP classes). Every year, I tried to max out my schedule with some kind of weighted class.

But why?

First, I wanted a perfect GPA. Doesn’t a 5.0 sound nice (especially in comparison to a dull 4.0 or a 3.something or other)? Sure, I knew that it wouldn’t mean anything for college (PRO-tip: college admissions unweight or reweight weighted grades as they see fit, of course, so as to not give anyone and unfair advantage due to their high school’s bureaucracy.) But…much like in video games…bigger numbers just feel psychologically better (experiment: if you play an RPG, analyze how many games feature hit points in the hundreds as opposed to the thousands…)

OK, so that was my bad answer. I have a worse one. Or rather…my pseudo-intellectual elitist answer. Quite simply, honors and AP classes were the only thing that even resembled challenge at the high school level. This isn’t to say that AP classes were particularly grueling…but I remember taking a few non-honors classes. To say the least, they depressed me about the state of education. I’m sure anyone who has compared their school’s AP or IB classes with the non-honors classes can tell of similar stories (assuming, of course, they don’t go to a completely higher caliber school in the first place.)

Another answer that seemed somewhat acceptable to me at first was the economic one: AP credits are a very worthwhile investment. AP classes lead to AP tests, and AP tests lead to AP test credits. At least…ideally. I entered college with 38 hours of credit (mostly AP credits but with 6 hours of dual enrollment) — to put that into perspective, I entered as a sophomore. Furthermore, that’s not even the best possible setup…others I knew entered as juniors.

There was a problem with this philosophy, however. Many students have dreams of going to super-prestigious schools…and in current years, these super-prestigious schools are less and less likely or willing to accept AP or IB credit (they have several reasons, many of which may be completely justified so that’s not the point). What worth is taking an AP or IB class and actually risking a lower grade when it will not offer any advantage?

I go back to my “worse” answer. Once again, AP classes are probably the most challenging opportunity at most schools, so academically-minded students (and especially those that dream to attend Ivy League or equivalent schools) have a duty to challenge themselves as much as possible.

Seriously…how pathetic is it if you take basketweaving? No offense to basketweavers…but that’s what extracurricular activities are for. In fact, if you start a basketweaving class at your school instead of wasting one of your hours taking a course, you look more impressive. PRO-tip 2: extracurricular activities are your friend when you’re trying to distinguish yourself from every other 5.0 student out there.

That being said, something I see people do is that they take AP classes, pass the AP tests…and then take the course over in college even though their credit counts. Most of the time, they expect to breeze through the class in question to easily cushion their grades…but sometimes, they are proven wrong. With disastrous effects for their grades. If you have AP/IB/CLEP/dual enrollment credits, why would you throw them out the window?

Not a math person…

I was thinking about high school again (as my first year in college comes to a close). I realize that back then, I was comically bad at math. Even worse, my reputation seems to have traveled with me a state over to college.

It’s not that I was bad at math (that is, if you can bear that finding that 18 divided by 6 = 4 is not bad math)…I was just bad at calculations…and I still am. If I can latch on to a general theory or the rule behind a system, then things are a little better…but then I’ll make thousands of errors in application.

I wouldn’t say that I hated math back in school. I actually liked most of my math classes…until I got to the point (which always happened very quickly) when I couldn’t figure out the correct answer…one way or another. Sometimes, the theory I needed to use would escape me (or maybe I had never learned it)…other times, I just wouldn’t be able to calculate correctly. In these cases, I really was trying to do things right (no one wants to be frustrated and wrong), but…I guess…as some might say…I was just not a math person. Interesting factoid about me: every B on my otherwise beautiful transcript came from a math or math-like class (chemistry).

It’s funny. Math is supposed to be super logical…so someone who likes logical things should like math. Unfortunately, in my personal pain olympics, I’ve never found that to be true. I find that math is increasingly convoluted and illogical. Its rules are dreamed up by select oracles of autism with the penchant for revelation from the devil on how to make humankind suffer a little more (plz don’t sue me, numerous parties blasphemed just now). Maybe it started with my geometry class…whose teacher never used proofs (how do you to go through a geometry class without ever using a proof?!)…but somehow, since then, I’ve lacked this foundation for math logic that has never quite caught up to me. Things that should be logical don’t seem that way, as a result.

I loved my AP Calculus class, though. It was like a mutual struggle for most of us…my teacher know about the particular geometry teacher and her ill-begotten legacy (everyone in that town does, of course), and so he had taken it upon himself to get us up to scratch with the basics while teaching us the new things (it also helped that he taught a PSAT prep class for sophomores and juniors, so we were able to absorb from that too.) Come to think of it, my AP Calc teacher (also my AP Econ teacher) kicked butt. Also, his wife who was my AP English teacher. There was lots of awesomeness between them and it’ll be sad when they finally retire (which they keep prolonging, fortunately), because then I’ll know that every class that doesn’t have them just won’t be good enough.

Well…even though it was only Cal AB (there would not have been enough interest for a BC class, the school administration told us), I felt good about math. To be honest, I still thought I was hopelessly inferior in the subject…after all, I wasn’t a “math person,” and in some of my other organizations (Academic Decathlon, Panasonic Academic Challenge, quiz bowl in general), I was surrounded by guys and girls who could outrun me many times around the mathematical race track…but I was feeling better about things.

Then came that fateful AP test of 2007. The free response…ugh…brutal…we all thought we had failed. No doubt about it. But I was ok with it, I thought. After all, I wasn’t a math person.

I got a 5.

I had never gotten one on any of our class’s AP run-throughs, of course. I couldn’t quite believe my 5 on the real thing was official (except for the fact that this was the most official result I had ever gotten).

That was a roundabout way of getting to here: what’s the deal with being a “math person” or not? Can’t we be competent either way? Sure, I can’t solve most problems in my head (or on paper) with any reasonable accuracy, but I know how they should work theoretically. It is excruciatingly frustrating and I’d never want to live my life doing it (which is why I’d never become an engineer, but that’s another story), but I am not hopeless and helpless. The moral of this story, I suppose, is that we can’t let labels be our handicaps…we do need to capitalize on our strengths…this is true, but we can’t let or weakness atrophy into nubs.

P.S. Accounting is not about math. I don’t know where people started this, but I really want to punch the person who started this. I have to explain ad nauseum about how the little math that is in accounting is not very advanced and can be outsourced to computers anyway…