here's my hot take on the AP exam thing, from the pov of an AP teacher. thread:

first, some context. i teach in a title 1 school. that means we have a large population of low income students. we're on 98% free or reduced lunch here. our race and gender makeup is about 60/40 male:female and probably...50/45 white:black 5% hisp/AA/other

i teach 10th grade, so my students are approximately 15-16. give or take. (i've taught 11th as well, and had mixes of 9th and 12th here and there.)

very few of my students read on grade level. VERY few. in my non-AP classes, my students tend to average according to MAP (a standardized test i actually do like quite a bit) around an 8th grade reading level.

most of our kids are not magnet. they're resides (local kids) or depot (insert extremely long story about louisville and redlining and jc*s busing here)

next year will be year five of me teaching in this same school, so i've seen a lot. in my first four years, i only taught "regular" kids. there are divisions in my school based on career track (which is a WHOLE OTHER BALLGAME, good lord, don't even get me started)

for the first three years i taught only regular population. i LOVE those kids. (i love all my kids). they consistently amaze me. but part of teaching is working with kids and getting them to rise up. to learn skills. good teachers do not hand you worksheets and say "good luck".

one of the biggest struggles of my teaching career so far has been the test-taking mentality. "i just need to know that for the test". kids tend to scan readings as fast as possible and look for the answer so they can just easily underline it and move on. they're looking for rote

because rote learning is all that they have been fed. this isn't their fault, for the most part. sometimes it's laziness, but i'd say 90% of the time it's because that is the level of challenge they have been handed. that is the hoop they are asked to jump through.

trying to teach critical thinking is an uphill battle, and that is because the system as a whole has failed them. things like the ACT don't really show how smart you are: they show how you can take a test.

the ACT is not a measure of intelligence. it is a measure of how privileged you are. Periodt.

do you know who does great on the ACT? kids who can get ACT prep. tutors. after school help. kids who have lots of time to study test questions (outside of their normal schoolwork!)

and that's not to say kids from these communities can't do well on the act cause that's INSANE, of course they can!!! but the sort of bootstraps mentality of "oh you just didnt try hard enough" is so insanely privileged it makes me so angry

if a kids hierarchy of needs (circa maslow) is not met, then trust me when i say the classroom is the last thing on their mind.

there are a THOUSAND ways to measure intelligence. i, for one, am a pretty smart cookie. i had all of those privileges i mentioned above. i have since gone to college and grad school (twice!) but you know what? i failed the state standardized geometry test in 10th grade TWICE.

i hate math. i have always hated math. i hated math because my mom used to get so frustrated with me and ask me why i was so smart but i couldn't figure it out, because it was easy for her. as an adult, i still hate math.

if i think about feeling the way i felt about that math class and test for every single test i ever took? i can see why i would hate school. i would've cracked like a fucking egg and probably rebelled out and not done anything.

and that's WITH all the privileges i have. now imagine feeling that way and also not being sure where you're going to sleep that night. now imagine feeling that way, and knowing you have to get home to feed your siblings because your parent is at work, or sth worse.

imma cite someone else's work here. from a paper published by the education law society:

so asking a kid who is in a constant state of emergency to sit for a three hour test to remember minutae or arbitrary test skills that will be IRRELEVANT the moment the test ends is absolutely fucking BONKERS.

now, circling back to my original point about AP itself.

screw the test. focusing on the content: the real benefit of a course like APMWH (which i teach) is in the hands of a good teacher, it can be wonderful for building critical thinking skills.

i actually really loved the AP test's format this year for APMWH (testing issues, traumas, etc, aside. that's a diff ballgame, see above about trauma teaching). i would like the format of the AP test this year (with maybe like one addition + some more time) to be more like this.

if you don't know, the APMWH exam was one document based question essay. they only had 45 minutes to write it, and they only received a small number of documents.

the point spread was different this year, too. kids could obtain 10 points, 2 of which came from outside knowledge (so things not referenced in the documents).

here's the thing. essay writing gives kids a chance to flex their argumentative skills. not their "oh i remember this random factoid about mongolia". i always joke to my students that the reason i hate math is because i can't argue my way into a correct answer.

one of the joys of a social studies/history course is that everything is open to interpretation. i focused heavily on building my students writing skills this year because i know that argumentation, critical thinking, and bias recognition are skills they will use IN REAL LIFE.

teaching AP really gave me a vehicle to get those skills imbued in my kiddos in a way that i'm not sure they had often before me. we practiced citing evidence, we HAPP'd documents all day long, we practiced constructing arguments and finding nuanced point of views.

i give out essay DBQs but i also love giving them in debates, and in games like argument jenga (my favorite game, ever, if you teach any upper level history course i would HIGHLY recommend it). i try to apply the skills of DBQ writing to both written and verbal things

i told my kids at the beginning of the year: if you can do well on the writing portion of this test, you can pass the test, even if you bomb the MC. (admittedly, i was relieved when they announced the test format this year HAHA) but!!

so because of that, i spent a lot of time working writing, all year long. and we didn't get through all the content (COVID aside, i dont think we would have anyway), but i know my kids got something out of this course. and next year they'll have the building blocks to start -

-with the skills that they should have been taught from day one in their education careers.

the best assignment I think I gave right before the test was to have the kids go back and review the DBQ they wrote for their final. seeing their reflections of "wow, that was really bad

was heartening to me AND to them. seeing kids say "i can't believe i thought this was good" from december not only gave us all a good laugh but helped to build some SERIOUS confidence.

i know that the kids who tried in my class all year long will leave my class with valuable critical thinking insights. no matter what the test score ends up being, i KNOW (and they know!) that they LEARNED SOMETHING, and that it wasn't something pointless.

so that next year, when they move onto APUSH, they'll have the writing skills. they already know what a good dbq looks like. maybe next year, they can rock the content, too.

tl;dr: AP as a course is helpful. AP as a test is dumb, especially in the high stakes format.

my kids who STRUGGLED to write grew so much over the year. i changed assignments and made things fit and we scaffolded and adjusted and failed sometimes but succeeded others. the toil we worked through this year had payoff, no matter what a stupid exam number says.

addendum: i applied a TON of the stuff i used in AP to my regular classes. it had to be scaffolded so much but it was a wildly helpful process for me, and i think for my kids too. i feel like i improved a lot as a teacher this year... which is a good thing i think.

a good teacher is the difference between learning and torment send tweet