AP Exams are Still Here

This week's blog is a free-for-all so I'm going to continue the AP discussion from last week. Because that's related to psychology. And education is too, right? I dunno. I'm sleep deprived (still) so this post is a bit of a mess.

One week of APs have gone by! Congrats to everyone for making it halfway. We're almost there! Summer break is coming.

Here's how my week went, if anyone was wondering:

Monday - I spent the entire morning cramming whatever psych knowledge I could into my brain. 30 minutes before the exam, I think we had a prayer circle. It was truly a stressful situation, but I think I did well on it!

Tuesday - I tried my best to learn some more APUSH. I also panicked about the English 4 AP and had to bother Allison about it. It was a mess.

Wednesday - I took the English 4 AP. It wasn't that bad? I'm not too skilled with poems. It's all good. Then I went home and studied a BUNCH of APUSH. Arman and I got this great idea for him to just... teach me the entire curriculum. Maybe we should've gotten this idea a bit earlier? So we Skyped about that. I took a 20 minute break to study for my Chinese quiz, then went back to APUSH.

Thursday and Friday - THE DAY!!! OF CRAMMING! It was terrible! I started crying around 7-8PM because I realized how terribly unprepared I was. Arman and I Skyped the entire night; he had planned on staying up all night while I had planned on sleeping at 11:30. What actually happened was: I took a nap around 11:30 and tried my best to listen to Arman teach me APUSH. I gave up and slept at 12, he kept studying. I woke up at 2AM (he had gone to sleep at 1:45) and, in a panic, I tried to study more APUSH until I collapsed at 4:30AM. When I got to school, I was a mess. But then... just like that it was over. My worst exam of the year!

So here I am now, contemplating what was definitely the worst, most stressful, most horribly panic-inducing week of my entire life. What's the point? I won't remember any details about these courses in a few years. While the Jacksonian Era was important, will I really need to recall that he caused some panic or depression or something (oops I already forgot)? So, for this week's blog post, I'll be analyzing (complaining about) the United States education system!

My psychology knowledge has already disintegrated (sorry Ms. Halfen!), so I don't have a very good memory of names and such. SOME GUY said that a certain level of arousal (stress) makes for optimal performance. Lower-mid level of arousal for difficult tasks, mid-higher level of arousal for easy tasks, etc. So??? Why is school so stressful? :( School is difficult, especially exams that cover extensive amounts of information, yet we all place so much emphasis on it that we make students super anxious and stressed. As many people like to do, I'll bring up Finland's superior education system, which is pretty much the opposite of our system! And they have better scores and stuff. I'm pretty sure that's reflective of SOME GUY'S arousal theory thing.

This is me with my
workload tbh!! What a mess

Honestly though, I've given up on an entire week's worth of homework just for these AP exams. We had two Chinese quizzes back-to-back (which I thought was unfair) on Thursday and Friday; since Friday was the APUSH exam, I didn't study for Chinese at all and got a max of a 75 on it. We had a precal quiz on Thursday, but I hadn't TOUCHED any of the homework because of APs, so I didn't do well on that either. I had an art project due, but I've only done... like... 50% of it. I haven't even started on All the Pretty Horses for English. So. Now I have to catch up on all of that! Is this amount of stress and sleep deprivation REMOTELY healthy for students? No! I used to love school! What happened? Where did America go wrong? Finland only has one standardized test in the entire 12 years of school! How many have I taken in the past two years?? 10??????

Finland has the smallest gap between students, meaning that a child in a rural area has the same opportunity to get a quality education like children in cities! This is because education is funded by the government and schools can pull from the same pool of university-trained teachers. These teachers truly prioritize the well-being of their students. MEANWHILE our government throws college students into debt, and many teachers aren't appreciated or paid enough!

I dunno. I don't know how to fix this mess. I just know that all us students are suffering. Just hang on. One more week of APs. Three more weeks of school after that. We can do it.

Links in this post

Finland article - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/?no-ist