Incessant crying at night. Frequent nausea. Increase in blood pressure. These are just a few of the many dreadful symptoms I have endured while trying to juggle my AP and AICE classes.
Taking advanced classes isn’t new to me. Freshman year I took AP Human Geography and sophomore year I decided to step up my game and take AP World History along with AICE General Paper. I made it through both years with straight A’s throughout (with the exception of one B), and as I was choosing my classes for my upcoming junior year, I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve made it this far, why not go big or go home?” With overconfidence overriding my body, I signed up for three AP classes and two AICE. And guess what?
I was wrong.
Each advanced class requires your full attention, whether it’s reading 30 pages of a chapter in your textbook to analyzing and writing lengthy essays, you can’t just skim through one homework assignment and move on to the next. Well, it’s not like I didn’t know this already, and to be honest, the workload is not my problem.
The problem is trying to maintain FIVE sets of workloads. I may study a little bit more for one subject and put the other one off until later, but that just drops my grade in one class and raises the other. Then, when I try to bring up the grade that I dropped, I end up not putting enough time into another subject, and that grade falls, too. In the end, it becomes a never-ending cycle of cramming and stress.
And while I’m busy worrying about maintaining a high GPA/HPA, I tend to forget the main reason that I’m even taking these college leveled courses: to receive college credit. Sure, I can complete my assignments on time, pass the class with a mediocre grade, and have a substantial GPA/HPA, but when exam time comes and I realize that I haven’t learned anything, I might as well follow the advice of ‘NSYNC and wave “bye, bye, bye” to all of those free college credits I could have earned.
It all comes down to this – I could have the brain of Einstein, or the supernatural abilities of Superman, but in the end, it’s all about time management. Planning and doing work ahead of time is awesome, but putting more effort in one class than the other, I’ve learned, is a recipe for disaster. All advanced classes need their fair share of time and though it seems overwhelming, it’s not impossible.
