Some people might say that what helped them mature and grow into the person they are today was a certain sport that they dedicated all their time to, or a job that they worked their fingers down to the bone for. For me, it was a class that for the entirety of last year, laid dormant, waiting for its opportunity to spring back to life this year. This class was AP American History.
When I started my sophomore year, I was a creature in rather poor condition. Spastic, anti-social, and never given a true challenge by academics. Walking into AP American History, I had expected an A to come easily. After all, history classes had never been a challenge before. I could take any era and tell you something about it, and I could breeze my way through any essay with as minimal information and effort as possible, and still have it praised as one of the best the teacher had seen.
The day class started, we were given 7 textbooks. Needless to say, that was unexpected. However, I did not think much of it. The first 2 weeks of class were relatively easy, brushing up on our essay writing skills and our note taking skills. However, soon the work flooded. More work than any class had ever given me was thrust into my schedule with only a week to do it. Note cards with words that had to have the most in depth definitions one could possibly give them, notes that were more than notes, but pieces of analysis themselves, and in depth summaries of firsthand historical sources and essays by accomplished and well known historians.
I had never been forced to do so much work in one week. My stress level had gone from nothing to immense in a matter of days, was hopelessly trying to fit all this work in with the work I had from other classes (The fact I was on the JV football team at this point was not helping). So there I was, a total spaz who was prone to getting very stressed, in a class where it was near impossible to ever get work in on time or to the teacher’s liking, where I had previously been able to do both of those things without so much as a slight struggle, at least in most classes.
AP brought the absolute best out of me, forcing me to pull out all the stops that I had previously had in my writing and in my school efforts. I was able to form a stronger sense of description in my writing, and gained many of my critical and analytical skills from my time in the class. I know that if had I not taken AP American History, the film reviews I’ve written for this site would not be half as good as I feel I’ve made them, and I would not be writing nearly as many strong articles and papers as I have this year.
Perhaps even more important to me than the academic benefits have been the benefits to my social skills. APUSH forced me to be a more social creature, and interact with the people who were taking on the challenge of the class with me. By the end of it, we all were united by the difficulty of the class, and were much more mature and grown by the end of the class. We all had something tying us together, making a strong connection that made getting through the terrible work somewhat less painful. While I don’t often communicate with many of my AP classmates, whenever we get together and talk the atmosphere holds all the experiences we had together in the class.
With another year of students going through the class this year, I’m happy to know that more people will be able to take the challenge that helped form me into a stronger writer and better person. I wish them all luck, and hope that they take away just as much and even more that I was able to my sophomore year.
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