I’m wondering how much summer pre-AP work your kids tend to have, and if it has impacted any of their decisions regarding being away from home… for instance, working at a sleep away camp? We seem to have a significant amount of summer work assigned for each class and I’m not sure how my kid can complete all of it and also take a job away from home for almost the entire summer. How do kids do it? Or - is our district unusual in the amount of pre-work assigned.
Thanks!
My daughter’s school assigned a significant amount of summer work for each AP class. Their excuse was that being a NJ school which started after labor day the kids had less time to prepare compared to those southern schools that start way before labor day. My daughter had fairly light volunteer summer jobs (only a few weeks), so she had sufficient time to do the work.
Then, since after the AP exams they still had close to a month of school left, they would then assign huge projects for each AP class to be done during those last weeks. So, the kids got slammed on both ends of the school year!
As I recall from my kids’ experiences with AP Bio, Chem, Physics (B and C), Calc (AB and BC), US Gov, US History, World History, European Hist, Art History, Span Lang, Span Lit, Span Lang, Span Lit, Eng Lang, Eng Lit, and Human Geography, the only ones that assigned summer homework were Eng Lang and Eng Lit.
Typically to read a book and write a paper.
From my perspective your district is unusual, but it could be that ours is the exception to the norm.
Some of our AP classes required something. (I don’t think Latin or math did.) It wasn’t that onerous. The AP Bio kids read one of the review texts, AP Euro read something and wrote a paper using it early in the term, but not the very first day.
In our area AP Lang, AP Lit, and all Engl. classes have summer work. For the past 3 or 4 years they have also offered freshman AP Bio and AP US Gov’t. Those 2 classes required substantial summer work and also summer classes since the students haven’t had 9th grade Bio or Gov’t and the classes were back to back (period 1 reg Bio, Period 2 AP Bio). So, the summer prior to 9th grade was the only one that was substantially affected by classwork. Many students had jobs/camp work during the other summers.
My girls had summer homework in AP Lang and Lit. They also had pretty large summer projects in AP Bio and AP Environmental. Oh yeah, and I remember some for AP Physics as well.
So far we have noticed that our school has considerable work is APUSH, AP Lang,AP Calc. Other classes like AP Bio, AP Govt, AP Computer Science and AP world were reasonable. APUSH is the worst. When my oldest took it he ended up working on it for weeks. Our school starts at the first week of August so they have the whole school year to teach the material. I am not looking forward to my middle son taking APUSH next year. The only good thing I can say is that the majority of the kids who take APUSH at our school get 4’s or 5’s.So I supposed there is a benefit to the summer work. My oldest didn’t have a job away from home during the summers…if he had he wouldn’t have been able to get all the AP work done.
Our district has week long optional “classes” that helped focus the kids in doing the summer work. But if you both were to look at his summer schedule…would he work the entire summer or would there be some weeks at the beginning and end that are off? Could he do the work then? Does he have to work the entire summer/
APUSH had a ridiculous amount of summer work. AP-Global had quite a bit of work, including some mandatory online dialogues/debates. My son had to do some work while we were away on vacation. AP-Econ had required reading and answering questions. No summer work for AP sciences or math. Both my kids had a lot of reading and writing assigned for honors English. My kids didn’t take AP-English, but I know there is assigned work for that class, too. Nothing was as bad as APUSH, though. I can see how it could impact summer decisions, depending on the student and how disciplined they are, and availability of a computer, etc.
Our school district has NO AP summer work based on a study they cited that asserts that the work has no impact on AP test scores.
Our district has minimal summer work except for APUSH (I think they had to read, outline and answers questions on 5 chapters of the textbook and also read a supplemental text that they were then tested on the first week of school) and all English classes have at least 1 summer reading book, sometimes two and there is usually an essay due the first week of class. I think for AP Econ, the kids had to watch a couple of documentaries and maybe also complete some reading, don’t really recall. Neither of my kids had any problem getting it done.
Our district has no AP summer work, so that kids who move over the summer don’t start the year behind. Previous to that, it had been limited to reading a single book, and that only for Euro and the English sequence (one book a year as assigned summer reading starting in 6th grade for kids in the pre-AP track, which is the equivalent of honors).
AP English classes have had 4 books to read instead of 2 in regular English - summer reading is something every student does no matter what class they take.
Beyond that, nothing or very little. D had a day or two’s work on a project for APES this summer.
NONE! Public schools in Wisconsin must start in September. AP exams a month before the school year ends. I do not understand why teachers and students can’t get the work done during the school year. It is ridiculous to expect students to start a class before then. btw- good pass rates on AP exams for son’s HS in a blue collar city.
To my knowledge, our school has no summer AP work, though we’ll find out this summer if there is any for APUSH.
Here, you don’t know for sure until a couple days before classes start whether you actually got into the AP classes you requested. I suppose there are fewer kids bumped among juniors and seniors, and my current sophomore hasn’t been bumped yet. But, we are always warned that if several upperclassmen request the class, he could be bumped at the last minute.
Last year he spoke individually with the AP Chem teacher about taking that class this year without the prior non-honors “college-prep” Chemistry class. The teacher gave him an older textbook and suggested that he read Ch. 1-5 without doing any problems and he’d be fine.
I’ll chime in that our school district sounds like a lot of others—there was summer work in lit and lang but nothing in other AP courses. The work typically was read a couple of books and write a paper comparing them.
One of the high schools in our area was on the semester system and had AP classes in the spring, starting near the end of January. I know an AP teacher who had taught Chem, Anat&Phys, and Bio under that system and they never had a kid fail an AP test. They have since switched to year-long classes.
S2 had to read the first two chapters of the textbook for AP Bio and the book “Garbology” for APES this year.
Same here–summer work in AP Eng Lang and Lit, but not in other APs. But our school system assigns summer reading/writing assignments to EVERYONE, starting in elementary school.
No summer work in our district except for one book for AP Eng Lang and Lit. But I don’t recall that in any of my kids’ AP classes they failed to get through the curriculum during the school year.
Very limited summer work for APs, including APUSH. An article in AP Bio, maybe a review sheet or two in AP Chem but nothing that could not be one within a few days before school started. We too start after Labor Day but has not been a problem for AP tests. Although the past two years were a bit challenging due to lots of days off due to Hurricane Sandy and then a harsh winter last year. School was held on what should have been vacation days and on a Saturday to make up for lost days.