My son is a student at a fairly good Christian high school. Not outstanding, but OK (average ACT score there is about a 25). The school only offers 6 AP courses, one of which is AP US History. </p>
As a freshman, he took AP Comp Sci, got an A and did well on the AP exam, scoring a 4. He earned an A in World History, which was taught at an Honors level. This year, in addition to AP USHist, he’s taking Honors English, another Honors Comp Sci course and Algebra 2 (he’s on the AP Calculus track). These are moderately challenging courses, but nothing too heavy. He definitely has the time to put into AP USHist.</p>
The conundrum is this: So far, though, he (and we) are unimpressed with the teacher. He’s a newbie who’s been away from teaching for several years; this is his first year back in the classroom. After a full week of school, they’ve just gotten their first assignment, which is to read 15 pages from American Pageant. There seems to be no sense of urgency from the teacher. There’s been no discussion of writing assignments, and the teacher does not require students to submit chapter timelines, theme reviews or anything of the like. From what we’ve read, these sorts of exercises are par for the course in most AP US History classes. We’ve seen the online homework assignments, and through the second full week of school, the students will have only read two chapters of the book. In comparable online courses we’ve seen, two to three weeks of class often cover 4 to 6 chapters of the book, along with writing assignments, timelines, theme overviews, etc. </p>
Our son is bent on getting an A in the class and at least a 4 on the AP exam, and he’s well aware that 4s and 5s are hard to come by (only 28% of all test-takers earned a 4 or 5 on the 2013 test). Should he stay in the class and self-study on the side? If so, what would you recommend he do to upgrade the class’s effectiveness for him. Or, should he look to enroll in an online AP course instead (his school provides him that option, and our state offers a free tuition waiver for such courses; places like CTE, etc.) </p>
A final caveat: Our son’s biggest challenge is writing. He was asked to do very little of it in his junior high school, so last year’s English/writing work at the elite private school were the first of their kind for him. He did a lot of work on argumentative theses, topic sentences and even timed writings in his English class, but particularly in the first semester, it was a struggle. It was a real baptism by fire. By the end of the year, he had really improved and earned a 97% on his final exam, which was a capstone argumentative essay. One of the benefits we saw to him taking AP US History this year was the opportunity to continue to be pushed in writing and thinking critically. But … if the teacher doesn’t emphasize the writing piece and the how-to’s of FRQs and DBQs, then???</p>
Thanks in advance for your input.</p>