The AP season is over, and in order to deal with the ample class time that they now have on their hands, AP teachers often choose to assign end-of-the-year projects, teach further content, or just watch movies to tie all the content of the year together. However, some teachers are having difficulty striking a balance between overworking and underworking their students towards the end of the year. As a result, some post-AP teaching strategies are more detrimental than beneficial to the students.

Plenty of students believe that the end of the year should be spent trying to wind down from the stresses of earlier in the year. However, some teachers have chosen to extend past units or teach entirely new ones after APs and final tests have taken place. Despite the fact that continuing the education of students is beneficial, the new content is only taught for a short period of time and often covers content which does not completely relate to the previous units. This makes it difficult for students to retain much of that material. These units have the potential to drop students’ averages just before the end of the year, leading to even more stress carried with them into the summer break.

ring the summer as students see their friends less frequently and have less of a structure to their days. Piling stress from the end of the year on top of these resurfacing feelings may be dangerous. Also, because some students have final exams, engaging in a project which does not require students to do homework would provide them with more time to study for their finals in non-AP classes. Rather than teaching new units on unrelated content to students, the best option for end of the year teaching could be to assign students in-class final projects so that they can take everything that they have learned throughout the year and compile it into something more creative. This not only engages students, but takes away some of the stress of the end of the year.

Another issue that students face is being underworked at the end of the year. Although this might not seem like a huge problem, I know that I have personally struggled with the wide discrepancy between pre and post-AP workloads. Teachers playing movies for students at the end of the year or allowing them to have a free period can be frustrating for students like me, who took an AP class to pursue a passion or interest. Playing movies for students will not engage them, and frankly, with how tired we all are from this strenuous school year, these lackluster lesson plans are literally putting us to sleep.

Although students have been working hard all year and may just want to stop, providing the students with an outlet to channel their work from earlier in the year would make them feel as though all of the hard work that they have put into their classes had paid off. The best thing for the PHS administration to do would be to advise teachers to make sure that they have engaging but not stressful lesson plans. If PHS encouraged their teachers to engage their students creatively by compiling all that they have learned into these final projects, students would learn more and would be more interested in what they have learned, and this project would help kids to retain their previously learned material for future classes. For example, Dr. Robert Corell’s AP Chemistry class has been working to make “flipped videos” for the next year of Accelerated Chemistry students. Essentially, current students record videos teaching future students the content covered over the course of the year, which Dr. Corell will then actually use in order to help teach. Not only does this engage current AP Chemistry students, but it also aids in the learning of future chemistry students. Additionally, AP Chemistry and other AP science classes have been traveling to Princeton Public elementary and middle schools to engage students with fun science experiments.

Even though we are all tired and would prefer if school was over by now, it is important that teachers keep their students motivated by engaging them without introducing the high stresses of new units. Although we students cannot easily make executive decisions regarding our learning, we must make the administration aware of the shortcomings of the past few weeks of post-AP learning. Better teaching strategies must be used for future generations of PHS students.