70 thoughts on “Blog #100 – Final Reflection”

1. Eric Ajluni June 12, 2017 at 2:36 pm

   1. As the school year went on, I continued to get a better idea of what study habits did and didn’t work for me not only for this class, but higher level/AP classes in general. There were some things that really worked well for me. The PowerPoints and GoogleDocs were my favorite ways to review and hold information from a unit before test, I liked how they were both simple overviews of what was covered in the chapters. I could look through PowerPoints before a test, and if I am unsure on any broad topic, I could easily check out the details in the Google Docs. This was a lot quicker and easier than digging through the textbook, which leads to my least favorite thing. Reading the textbook chapter by chapter the whole way through didn’t work well for me. It was so long, tedious, and frankly boring that I did not stay focused or retained a lot of what I learned. Things like the Google Docs and Crash Course (I found these very helpful this class) videos were more engaging and I better remembered the info on the test.
   2. I think we were pretty balanced when covering the different time periods. It would have been nice to review the beginning of the history more at the end, but that is mainly because it was surprisingly very prevalent on the AP test. So besides that, I would have liked to focus more on the latest few decades in American history. When we covered the 1990s and early 2000s after the AP test, I found it the most interesting as it was history that still has very direct influences in my life included things my older friends/family remember. It included pop culture references I can understand and relate too. Though this was not on the AP test, for topics on it I would say the 80s and 70s for the same reason just to a lesser effect.
   3. There was not really a unit I hated more than every other, but the one I remember being hardest for me was the first things we covered with the colonies and pre Revolution time. Though it was prominent on the exam so I am glad we did it, ignoring that I struggled with remembering the attributes of all the different colonies. I felt like remembering all that and doing a mapping assessment on the first test was unlike anything else we did this year, and it was a little confusion. Not having the background knowledge we would have later in the year also made it tougher, such as understanding the different religions on the details surrounding it. Lastly, it was the first test/topic in an AP class, so without being used to it, it was naturally a little more difficult and overwhelming.
   4. I had a couple strengths and weaknesses that were distinct enough for me to recognize as the year went on. A strength of mine was on a test, I was able to recollect information often when I saw a question about a certain topic, which helped me on test. In other words, I held information well especially compared to other classes. Another important strength is that I actually find history a lot more interesting than most other topics. I generally do not find it as difficult as math or science, so not hating the class made it a lot easier to get work done and succeed. A weakness of mine is a basic student one, in that I often procrastinated work and studying so I ended up not doing my best on it. Even though it worked out often, it did not always and I could have been more on task in that regard. My other weakness was reading portraits. I found most of them incredibly boring, so reading them to answer questions was really tedious and I often rushed through it.
   5. I learned a lot about not just American history, but also what an AP class is like and what I have to do for it. I experienced the hardship people always talk about, and am better prepared for it in the future. Regarding American history, my main takeaway was how everything connects into one big history, and that over a school year of analysis you can take the very beginning 100s of years ago all the way up to when I was born and connect it all.
2. Lindsay Merline June 12, 2017 at 6:42 pm

   1. The learning style that I personally felt was most effective was actually the lectures and the powerpoints. I found that during the lectures, the class eventually had discussions all together on whatever chapter we were learning and it really helped me understand the chapter as a whole. The ability to ask about any confusing parts of the chapter while everyone was learning at the same time was great, and it made a lot of confusing things much clearer. Throughout the entire year, my least favorite way to learn was the guided reading notes. When we received a chapter’s notes and read them and highlighted them as a class, I found that I didn’t end up retaining as much information from the chapter as when we had discussions during the lecture/powerpoint notes. I’m not sure exactly why, but having the notes in front of me rather than writing them in didn’t help me study for the tests as much. I found I didn’t remember as much information either, and I had to keep referring to the notes that sometimes made no sense. On the PowerPoint notes I can write things in my own words, so the guided notes were a little bit of a struggle for me to study.

   2. I wish we had spent more time studying the actual chronological order that events occur in. I realized once I got to studying for the AP exam it would’ve been much more helpful if as I learned things through the year I understood more of when/where in history they took place. Having a base knowledge in the time period events happen can help (especially during the AP exam) with outside information and additional knowledge. We studied out of chronological order this year and skipped around history, and i think that ultimately made me very confused by the end of the year. I got to the point when I thought Watergate happened way back in the revolutionary times, and that’s when I knew that learning things in an out-of-order type of way caused me to struggle. Studying more on periodization and focusing more on that historical thinking skill ultimately would’ve been more effective for me. Specifically though, I wish we had spent more time studying the 1920’s. In my opinion, life started to get much more advanced during the ‘20s seeing as people were moving more and more into urban areas and out of rural areas. The new technology of the time along with an extreme influx of immigrants. We did cover this time period, but I wish we had possibly gone more in depth so I could have a better of the time period by the time of the AP exam. I found this specific time period was one of the ones I had the most trouble remembering.

   3. I felt like in the class, personally I remember studying communism a lot. Foreign affairs we talked about a lot. They’re extremely important, but I just remember studying Reagan and Gorbachev and the Soviet Union a lot, and when it came down to it it didn’t seem like the most important part of American history, although communism and America’s fear was real. We talked a lot about the Cold War, and it was definitely important but I feel like we spent a lot of time on it while we could’ve been studying other time periods that we touched on much less and less in depth.

   4. I found that my weakness when it comes to being a student is definitely procrastinating. I knew from everything that I’d heard about APUSH and it being difficult, but I found myself procrastinating literally the summer assignment before this school year even started. Along with that, I ended up procrastinating studying for the AP exam which I definitely shouldn’t have done. I’d wait until the morning the portrait was due and quickly read it sometimes if I was lacking time. This was most definitely one of my bigger weaknesses in this class especially because it hurt my comprehension and deep understanding of the history, I was just learning it to learn it. I think one of my strengths is that I’m pretty organized when it does come down to studying material. I always study in the same way by typing out my notes and organizing them specifically, along with using colors to enhance my note-taking. My reviews really helped me study for tests when I didn’t procrastinate until the night before. On the last test I found I didn’t do too bad, and I studied in an extremely organized way that time.

   5. The summer before I was in APUSH, I remember telling my dad I find history to be the most boring subject ever. I remember saying that I didn’t understand why we had to learn “stupid” history. From APUSH, I’m taking away the idea that history repeats itself. I understand more events in history and how it shapes our everyday lives. Without the class, I don’t think I would even have the slightest bit of interest in history.
3. Benjamin Iverson June 12, 2017 at 7:15 pm

   1. My favorite way to learn this year has been through class discussions and agree/disagree/undecided. This format is much more engaging than a PowerPoint and allows me to gain a deeper understanding than I would if I simply read or heard about something. Class discussions allow us to see the concepts put into context, something that can be difficult with many topics. Often, our class discussions get heated and people have their own strong opinions, which is great. If I have a strong opinion about something in history, I will remember it.

   My least favorite way to learn is through jigsaws. They move too quickly to fully absorb all of the necessary information, and often times, the information itself is not as detailed as if would have been if it was taught in another form. I do not like the fact that how well I understand a certain topic and how well I do on a test is determined by how hard one of my classmates works on their portion of the jigsaw. I enjoy collaborative work, but not in the form of jigsaws.

   2. I wish we had spent more time discussing the 1930s and FDR’s presidency. The New Deal was incredibly important and the time and remains incredibly influential to this day. Many questions on both the AP test and tests in class compare events throughout history to FDR’s New Deal and other policies. I feel that somehow between the jump to the future at the start of the year and where we ended before the test, the “meat” of FDR’s presidency was lost. It is a very interesting time, but, more importantly, it is a time that is frequently referenced in the curriculum. A deeper understanding of this would serve APUSH students well.

   3. I wish we studied the period of reconstruction less this year. While it is a very important and complex part of American History, I feel that a super in-depth coverage of the events is not 100% necessary. Learning about the different plans for reconstruction and which parties supported them is very important and useful on the test, but specific details beyond that complicated the issue and were a little confusing at times. Since the AP exam strays away from asking about a laundry list of facts, I feel that simply understanding the big picture concepts from that period would be sufficient.

   3. My greatest strength as an APUSH student was my proactive approach to assignments and the class as a whole. We are usually given a long time to complete blog posts, portraits, GoogleDocs, and other reading questions. I learned very quickly that if you waited until the day before these were due, assignments would pile up – and fast. After doing a portrait, blog post, and GoogleDocs all in one night, I realized that I would have to be smarter about doing my work if I wanted to keep my sanity. From that point on, I would make a point to always due my GoogleDocs shortly after they were posted. I pushed off Portraits a little more, but I rarely found myself doing them the night before they were due. This ended up being key to staying afloat in this class.

   My greatest weakness as a student in APUSH this year would definitely be my misuse of class time. I always had a lot of friends in this class and would make many more over the course of three trimesters. Because of this, when given free time to work on projects or other assignments, I was rarely 100% focused on the task. This isn’t to say I would blow off my work entirely and do other things, but I wasn’t working at the capacity that I should have. The “make your own PowerPoint” project comes to mind for this one. A lot of that project ended up being done at home due to misuse of time.

   5. There is not a single, perfect way to look at our history. The way we view our history will vary from person to person and inevitably changes from time to time. We are on a journey. We don’t know everything about where we have been or where we are going, but we must do our best to find out and to steer us in the right direction.
4. Tania Miller June 12, 2017 at 11:45 pm

   1. I enjoyed the note taking. While it may have gotten repetitive at some points I feel that through writing down the information that it stuck in my mind better. It helped me in learning/understanding the information through writing and asking questions. I didn’t like the note sheets that you gave to the class instead of the actual note taking, especially when you had kids read it. It just felt like the words were going in one ear and out the other. Writing it down helped the information stick better. When reading the article/notes you wrote yourself —while they were informative— they did not effectively help me understand the information given.
   2. I had a hard time when we learned about the economy/banks/money etc. It was difficult for me to wrap my head around the government and how it worked so I think that if we focussed on that general area a little more I would have done better on the tests because I would have a general understanding of it rather than me trying to memorize the information.
   Also the Korean and Vietnam war. I still have trouble telling the details of them a part. It seemed like we just skimmed over it, I know its not necessarily American History more foreign policy but I think learning it would help us understand the presidencies (during that time) and the United states’ feeling/perception at the time.
   Lastly the Spanish/French settlements. There was a lot I didn’t know about in regard to Spanish colonists in America and its exploration etc. It was a disadvantage when we were learning about New World colonists and boundaries/where the Spanish were and when they came.
   3. I don’t think you spent too much time on any of the topics. It was more like you sped through them quickly/evenly (which was necessary). Looking back there was no topic that I thought, “When will this end?” I think it was more watching certain movies dragged out some of the topics.
   4. Some strengths of mine were the Google docs and Blogs. I usually did them in advance and did them with ease. They were usually short while they still taught us/expanded a topic.
   I tended to procrastinate towards the end of the year, and studying became harder and harder. I don’t think we went enough into how to do DBQs or LEQs and we should have done more because while they were annoying at the time they were helpful when it came time for the AP test.
   I had trouble with the format of your tests. I never really grasped an understanding on how you asked questions/how to pick the best answer. I think if I had learned how you test I would have been able to do a better job.
   5. I learned that America has done a lot of bad things, and that most of the time we don’t learn from out mistakes. America goes through periods of great times and periods of very difficult times, and as a society/country that is normal. We tend to think we are a lot better than we are and we still have a long way to go before we are truly a “City upon a hill”.
5. Rayyan Mahmood June 13, 2017 at 2:41 pm

   My favorite way to learn were the ones where the students directed the activity and guided the discussion, with (sorry if this offends you) little input from Mr. Wickersham. My greatest example of this is when you gave us sticky notes (Specie) and APUSH bucks (Continental Dollars) and told us about how much each one was worth. Then we proceeded to try and make as much money as possible. We ran into problems during our exchanges, and you stopped the class and explained how our problems were very similar to the ones Revolutionary veterans faced. This helped me because it strengthened my multitasking-while trying to make money, I also had to focus on how the activity connected to US history. My least favorite method of teaching was watching movies in class and taking notes. Sure, it means an easy day, but I don’t feel like I took away much from just watching a movie and writing down what Bush said. It’s not very engaging and doesn’t involve the class as much.

   I feel like we should have spent more time on the Korean War. There were a lot of geopolitical and economic factors that led to the stalemate, and we only covfefed it briefly, as briefly as NSC-68. It was arguably as important and Vietnam and deserves more attention. All we learned about Korea was that MacArthur wanted to nuke China, but Truman said no and Eisenhower led to a stalemate.

   I feel like we should have spent less time on FDR and World War II. Unlike the complicated network of alliances and domestic dissent that WWI had, WWII was a simple and moral war-a war between two ideologies that were very distinct from each other. We spent way too much time on lend-leasing and the naval war-while I do agree that they are important, we also spent an ample amount of time covering that during our unit on President Wilson.

   My strengths were being persistent, like with reading the review book and actually reading the textbook. I was also good at turning in my assignments on time (except for that one portrait on Washington.) My weaknesses were losing attention during units that did not interest me as much (like the Carter Presidency and Truman’s Fair Deal), as well as forgetting dates and timelines (when did President X do Act Y, etc.)

   I learned a lot about the traditional image of the American farmer. Before APUSH, I had associated the American dream largely with Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt, but I never thought to look back at our agrarian origins. APUSH taught me a lot about the agrarian society that America was founded in, and how the character of the farmer that was developed by people like Jefferson, Jackson, and Bryan shaped the image of the perfect American.
6. Gabe Liss June 13, 2017 at 6:05 pm

   1. My favorite learning style was when we split up into groups and either Hipped or just discussed about different topics. I liked this way of learning because it was more hands on and collaborative. I felt that it helped me understand the material to hear the perspectives of my classmates, and then especially to teach or explain it to the class. I also liked the Google Docs a lot, because I got to specialize in a certain area of the material, but then I could easily access and study the other information to help me prepare for the tests. My least favorite method of learning was when we watched long videos. Although some of the videos were interesting to me, many of them dragged on and I often could stay concentrated on them. I actually did not mind taking notes on the videos,, because it helped me stay focused on the video.

   2. I wish we spent a little more time covering World War 2, especially outside of the United States. I know that we are only covering US history, but I think that some of the stuff that was going on around the world, such as the Jewish genocide and the battles that too place would be very interesting to learn more in depth. I also think that it would cool to go over some of the war strategies and tactics used by various countries to see how they tried to get an edge. Overall, I wish we spent a little more time studying the fascinating turn of events around the world that was happening during World War 2, whether it had to do with Germany, the Soviet Union, or the war on the Pacific.

   3. I wish we spent a little less time on the Cold War. I did not find the Cold War very interesting to learn about, especially because nothing actually broke out or happened. I found it kind of ridiculous that both countries built so many nuclear weapons, just to compete to see who had more. One nuclear weapon is too many, and only two have ever been used. It still boggles my mind that each country built hundreds of these weapons, for no real purpose. There were so many other important things that went on during the Cold War, such as the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War, that I felt that learning about the rising tensions between the Soviet Union and United States for thirty years got a little stale after a while.

   4. My biggest strength as a student was making the material interesting, as many of the things we learned about was very fascinating and still has its effects today. By trying to stay interested in the material, it helped me not only try and memorize different terms and events, but it helped me truly understand them and why they happened. My biggest weakness as a student was reading and comprehending some of the primary sources on tests. I often felt the sources were very hard to read and follow, so I sometimes was forced to kind of guess what they meant. I also am not the strongest writer, so I could have done a better job on the long essay, dbq, and short answers.

   5. As a country, America had to go through many challenges and obstacles whether it was economically, foreign, or different beliefs in our own country. However,, these challenges made us stronger and made us into the great country that we are today.
7. Donavin Stoops June 13, 2017 at 6:19 pm

   1) My favorite learning style throughout this great class was watching the videos and doing video notes along with them. I like this style because the videos really helped me learn about the subject. For example, the Cuban Missile Crisis video really helped me understand the whole ordeal of how dangerous those few days were for the world. I think that videos help me understand large and such important events much more than any other way of teaching can. My least favorite way to learn was the group project where we presented our own lesson to the class. There was a couple of reasons why I did not learn much from this. For one, we spent so much time doing our project that we could have finished a normal and insightful powerpoint notes before we even started to present our lessons. Secondly, I didn’t like it because I didn’t learn much from other peoples presentation since they weren’t masters at it like a teacher would be. Also, some peoples presentation was simply boring and it was hard to pay attention to. At the end of the project, I only mastered my topic that I spent a few days researching about.

   2) I really wish we would have spent some more time on the Great Depression and FDR’s early time in office. We ran out of time before the AP Exam to cover this, but I think it was a very crucial topic to know and get down, especially the New Deal. It would have also been beneficial to know what started the Great Depression more and what it was like. We went over this topic in class in only a day or two and I had to end up self-studying this topic much more for the AP Exam since it was rushed through. Even with the studying I did for it, I still don’t think there

   3) I think that we possibly spent a little too much time on the late 90’s. Although it was very interesting to learn about that entire time period, I do not think all of it was necessary if you look at it compared to the AP Test. Most of the test wasn’t about those 50ish years we learned and the class time could have been used for other topics time periods than that.

   4) I think my strengths as a student is being able to comprehend what is being talked about in class. For example, when we talked about the 7 years war in the beginning of the second trimester, I had a good sense of what was being talked about while other students were very confused because of how we switched back to the Pre-American era quickly. However, my weakness in this class was definitely reading about history like in a book or on a test. In portraits I could rarely concentrate on what was being said in the portraits because I reading historical information was my weakness. Another example is on tests when there was a long passage that we had to read about. After I read that passage I realized that I had no idea what it was talking about. That’s the same for other independent readings about American History like material that we’ve read.

   5) In American History I learned that America has its good past, its bad past, and its terrible past. America was never perfect before and me learning that changed my mindset of ‘America always being perfect’ like-mentality that I had in the beginning of this year.

   Thank you so much for all the work you put in for us! This class was truly amazing and you taught us much insightful knowledge and other techniques that will be very useful outside of this class. Have a great summer, Mr Wickersham!
8. Alex Hidalgo June 13, 2017 at 6:29 pm

   1: My favorite in-class learning style was watching videos. This type of learning is pretty laid back and chill, but at the same time the students actually learn a lot. I think that this type of learning is most effective when us students are told to take notes, because it keeps us focused on the video and gives us an outline for the key points made. Another in-class learning style that I enjoyed was hands-on activities such as when you brought in cotton to all the classes. This worked well for me because it was very engaging and it gave me a chance to experience history rather than just hearing or reading about it. My least favorite way to learn was reading portraits and answering questions on them. Reading page after page about Bill Gates’ family game nights can certainly make one feel unmotivated. Spending so much time on these portraits felt so asinine. Every time without fail when portraits were assigned there would be an audible groan from the students, who knew that they had a fun 2 hours awaiting them on Sunday night. A more in-class type of learning that I disliked was reading long excerpts. I understand the importance of being able to comprehend primary sources, but I feel like we could be utilizing our class time better than by reading through pages of 150-year-old speeches. This method of reading long excerpts doesn’t work for me because the writing style of the men and women we’re reading from is so difficult to follow, and reading these speeches isn’t very engaging.

   2: I wish we had spent more time this year on the 2000s. The 2000s is the era that I was raised in and that I can actually remember certain influential events. I was excited to learn about an era that I lived through and that had affected me so much, but time constraints and other priorities hindered this excitement. I get that the 2000s aren’t a high priority at all, with zero questions from the 2000s showing up on the AP exam this year, but I do think that the 2000s was a super interesting era with lots of great content. I certainly appreciated the video of the Great Recession that was shown when you were gone and I was really interested with the contents. With this being said though, I think the 2000s deserves more time spent on it as it’s a very important and influential era.

   3: I really didn’t feel like we spent an absurd amount of time on any certain time period. The eras that were immensely important and were sure to show up on the AP exam were analyzed extensively as we spent weeks on them, while the eras that were less important were narrowed down and breezed over. If I had to pick a unit that I would’ve wanted shorter though, I would say the Gilded Age. This unit contained a DBQ, a video quiz, the reading of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and a 20-point quest. With all these formative assessments, it’s safe to say that an ample amount time was spent on this unit. After a few days of learning about the Gilded Age, I felt like the information became redundant and unnecessary. It was the classic storyline of rapid economic growth, but at the expense of workers, immigrants, and poor people in general. There were also wide-spread reform movements during this time. I think that one era being weighed so heavily with the reading of books, writing DBQs, and taking quizzes was a mistake. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Gilded Age was very important, but I feel as though it doesn’t warrant nearly as much time as we put into it.

   4: I’d say that my biggest strength as a student was my ability to effectively study. I utilized the google docs and in-class handouts to prepare myself sufficiently for the tests. I was always a good test taker because of this. Another strength of mine was that I had the discipline to sit down on a Sunday night and grind out a portrait. I sure as hell didn’t like it, but I knew that the portrait needed to be done. I never had any missing assignments in APUSH or late work because of this. Taking notes was also a strength of mine. Whenever we had PowerPoints out and you were giving a lecture, I’d be taking notes and starring key points. The notes I took definitely helped me when I was going over hand-outs to prepare for tests. Short answers were a huge weakness for me this year, especially when they were timed. I’m not the best at writing essay answers as it is, but when the factor of time was added into the equation I just knew that I’d be doing poorly on any short answers before I even took the test. Another weakness of mine this year was my inability, and frankly my lack of desire to read the textbook. I haven’t legitimately read my APUSH textbook since late August when I was doing the summer assignment. I used a website called “coursenotes.org” instead of reading the textbook because reading out of the textbook might just be the most mind-numbing thing I could ever think of. Had I actually read the textbook though, I feel like my understanding and comprehension of the material would’ve been amplified.

   5: I learned from APUSH about patterns, reoccurrences in history, and human nature in general as we went through 500 years of American history. Stepping outside the subject matter of history, taking APUSH taught me how to truly think critically.
9. Joey Shapero June 13, 2017 at 7:04 pm

   1.) My favorite learning style of APUSH this year was watching videos with Questions, Facts, and Hashtags. This worked so well for me because, I’m going to be honest when I watch a video in class and don’t have to take notes I tend to dose off and lose focus of the content, but the experience of QFH really helped me retain the information. Not only was it an engaging experience for me during the video, but after the fact it helped me study for tests as well. My least favorite was to learn this year was through highlighting passages and reading them aloud. Many times when we would do this I really would not be retaining the information but just highlighting because that was what we were supposed to do. At the end when it was all finished, I just had a sheet with different things highlighted, but did not pick up much knowledge from it. I much rather prefer to write notes down in my handwriting because it helps me remember the ideas more, like we did with the PowerPoints.

   2.) In my opinion one thing that I wish we studied more this year was the assassination of President Lincoln and the whole story. I feel we just lightly skimmed over It because everyone knows the basics of what happened, but I feel the story is so important for American history, that if we looked more into the story of John Wilkes Booth and the following events in finding him it would have been very interesting. Another thing that I wish we learned more about was Eisenhower’s presidency. I do not remember much about learning in depth about the presidency, but through our tournament I feel I got a great understanding of how influential Ike was, and wish we learned more about that in class.

   3.) I feel that one topic I wish that we studied less was the battle over the banks with Hamilton and Jefferson. I do understand it was a very important event that occurred in our country’s history but I just feel we studied it too much. I remember spending a few days on it and I was very bored by the end. I do still think it is a very important topic to learn abut, but the amount at which we did it in my opinion was too much. I really do feel that all of the units were very helpful and we spent a good amount of time on each, but if I were to have to pick another I would probably chose the feminist era with Betty Freidan and Phyllis Schlafly, this is not because this unit was unimportant, it was super important as it not only gave women the rights they deserved, but also was shown on the AP test in the form of a LEQ. The reason why I feel we should have spent less time on this was because we did spend a lot of time on this era and I feel that a few days of this would have been enough, because it was not too complicated of a topic to learn

   4.) Specifically for APUSH class I feel one major strength of mine was my work ethic. I really worked hard to get all of my work done on time and do the extra credit assignments. While portraits took a very long time, I feel my good work ethic helped me get those done and even make time to do the extra credit which was very important in shaping my grade in the class. Another strength I feel I had in APUSH was my focus in class. I really feel I retained the information in class well and enjoyed it for the most part. A few weaknesses that I had though, were my test taking and study habits. Going into this class I really thought I had good study habits and could prepare myself for any test, oh boy was I wrong. Studying a few hours before the test was not enough for APUSH, and I think I learned that after seeing my test grades after 1st tri. As the school year went on my study habits improved and along with that did my test grades. I still feel I can improve upon my study habits though. I also was not the best test taker in APUSH. The tests were very hard and rarely consisted of straight facts. Most questions were interpreting historical documents, cartoons, speeches, and more. I was not very good at doing this and it took my a very long time to get adjusted, but I realized come AP test in May it was for the better, and I know that it helped me a lot on the test.

   5.) my takeaway from APUSH is that you can never run out of US history, there is so much to learn in only 1 year, and in order to learn so much you really have to push yourself. I learned to push past my limits and go above ad beyond my expectation of myself, I learned that no test, quiz, or essay is too challenging if you believe that you can do it. All of these things not only will help me in other classes in school, but I know they will help me in life as well, and I truly thank you for that.
10. Marshall Lockyer June 13, 2017 at 7:09 pm

    1. Maybe an uncommon opinion, but I really enjoyed the PowerPoints that we did and the class discussions that came with them. I found these to be helpful because you were able to give lots of information on a certain topic in a way that was easy to understand and this format made it easy to ask questions. I think the reason I enjoyed these so much is because group discussions and in depth explanations suit my learning style and I am more prone to zoning out with less engaging learning environments. My least favorite learning style was the portraits and reading out of the textbook. I don’t know why, but I struggle to remember important details with this style of learning and I often have to read the portrait or the chapter twice to fully understand it.

    2. I wish we were able to spend more time talking about the 90s and the early 2000s. I like learning about things that happened during my life time, such as the Obama presidency, 9/11 and the great recession and things that happened just before I was born such as Bill Clinton’s presidency, the OJ Simpson Trial and the Gulf War. Furthermore, liked this because I wasn’t old enough to understand everything that was going on during the great recession and Obama’s first term and I’m glad that I can now say I understand it.

    3. After lots of thought, something I wish we spent less time on was the 1950s. To me it seemed to be the least interesting decade we studied. This is only because I find things before it, such as World War II and the Great Depression and things that happened after it such as the Watergate and Reagan’s economic plan and how he ended the cold war more interesting. However, I recognize the importance of the beginning of the civil rights movement and the fight against communism and how it ties into the events that occurred later in the century.

    4. I think my biggest strengths as a student are, perseverance, listening skills, I’m willing to learn, and I think my critical thinking skills have come a long way this school year. I have done poorly on some tests this year, however, I don’t beat myself up, I just try to study more and I usually do better on the next test. I think the listening skills go along with the PowerPoints, but when I’m engaged in class discussions I learn a lot more than I would if we didn’t have them. In terms on being willing to learn, I always come to class on time and I think I add a positive attitude to the class. Lastly, I think my essays in this class have improved vastly and this is evident in my grades. My first SAQ was a C- and my second one was an E, however, I scored a 5/6 on the SAQ on the first tri final and I promise a well written and thought out final essay tomorrow! By far my biggest weakness as a student is that I’m easily distracted. I don’t think I was as successful as I could’ve been 2nd tri because I had a lot of friends in that class.

    5. I think my biggest takeaways from APUSH are the actual content we learned and being able write about a topic and providing evidence to support your case. I think being able to write thoroughly and accurately is a valuable skill to have in life, so thank you very much for teaching me this skill and not allowing me to get away with the bare minimum.
11. Kyle Alkatib June 13, 2017 at 7:48 pm

    1. My favorite learning style this year would probably be the powerpoints that you used almost all year. I really liked these powerpoints and I feel like they really taught me well. When you were standing up there and going over the powerpoints, I felt like I really understood the topics and when it came to studying for the test, I didn’t really need to study that much material because I knew most of it from the powerpoints. The only thing that I did not like about the powerpoints was that a lot of the times the powerpoint was only a portion of what that chapter was. There would be more stuff on the google docs that you did not go over in the powerpoints. But I do understand that we didn’t have enough time and that is why you were not able to go over every single thing. My least favorite way to learn were the group presentation projects. I thought that these were a bad idea because we as students do not know what material we are supposed to be learning and what we need to look for. I feel like the teacher should do all the teaching because they know what is going to be on the test and they know what we need to be taught. The students can also get things wrong when the teachers usually do not.

    2. I wish we spent more time on the early to middle 1900s. I feel like we ran out of time before the AP test so you rushed through this time period of the Great Depression. We still were able to cover most of the main points but I feel like we needed to learn a little bit more. We rushed through this time period a lot so that we can get everything we needed to know for the AP test. I think that if we spent less time on other less important time periods earlier in the year, we would have had more time to cover everything we needed to know for the AP test. That was probably the only time period/topic that I feel we rushed through. Other than that and the topic of the Indians and pre-America that I will mention in the next question, I think that you spaced out everything else perfectly.

    3. I wish we did not study the Indians and pre-America. Personally, I thought that this time period was very very boring. Not only did I think it was boring, I did not like it at all so I could not remember any of it. I just couldn’t remember the different tribes and about each colony and what thy did. I also don’t think you really need it for the AP test. I just thought that was the most boring part of APUSH and I had a very hard time learning it over the summer. It would have been great if we spent much less time on this time period.

    4. My strengths in the class were understanding the topics right away when you were teaching the powerpoints. Usually I got most of the stuff you taught us right away and I did not have to study that much for the tests because I got most of it. I usually get things right away the first time they are taught to me so that would be one of my strengths. A weakness I have is that I was never able to understand any of the primary sources. When w e went over them in class, I would not get it until someone raised their hand and explained what it is saying. I also struggled during most of the tests because I had no idea what the primary sources were saying, so I was not able to use it for the question.

    5. My takeaway from APUSH was that America had a lot of great times but America also had a lot of bad times. There were many amazing decisions and accomplishments made like what Lincoln was able to accomplish and there were also bad things like when Johnson or Buchanan were president. Another takeaway from APUSH was that you need to pay attention in class and you need to study. Because things usually come easy to me, I usually don’t need to study that much but this class made me realize that not everything is easy. There are things that you really need to try on to be successful. Another thing is that I realized American history is actually very interesting and I never thought that I would actually like it. I have always hated history and as I am writing this, I realized that I actually kind of like history. Thank you for a great year with you. You are a great teacher.
12. Zacharie Chentouf June 13, 2017 at 7:58 pm

    1. A lot of time this year has been spent reading, writing, studying, watching videos, reflecting, and talking about American history. This year, my favorite learning style was going over the Power Points that were made by Mr. Wickersham. This was effective for me because I believe that they were thorough, yet concise for each chapter, and gave a nice summary and main points of the textbook chapters that I read. When Mr. Wickersham elaborated on the main points seen in the Power Point, I really felt as if I was gaining a lot of useful knowledge, some of which wasn’t even in the textbook, and it was extremely interesting. The discussions that the Power Points sparked in the class also led to some debates and reflecting through conversations, which I believe made me remember the material, and the different perspectives and viewpoints on it clearer. Sometimes, the textbook provided a lot of facts, but didn’t look at different perspective, and it was nice to be able to look at these through class discussions that resulted from learning the important material in the Power Points. My least favorite way to learn were watching the movies because I sometimes felt lost during them, and not fully understanding them, which is why they didn’t work for me. The content in them was interesting and quality most of the time, but it was harder to focus on it than the material seen in the Power Points. Movies are harder to focus on than people talking in front of you, but Power Points are easier, especially when you feel involved in the discussion, the teacher is talking, and you can ask questions. Sometimes, the movies were older, and the images presented in them were hard to see. The voices were also sometimes hard to understand, and hard to focus on as they were sometimes not passionate.

    2. We studied a lot of stuff this year – from the Pilgrims to the Revolution to Andrew Jackson (soon to be leaving the $20) to Abe Lincoln to Alice Paul to the Yippies to the Great Recession and beyond. I wish we had spent more time studying the evolution of the Native Americans throughout time, and how their culture changed throughout the years because it is so interesting, and a major part of American culture that is often forgotten or set aside. We did look at some of their tribes at the beginning, but most of these were focused in the East Coast, and we did not even glance at some extremely powerful tribes in the West coast that were prominent in fighting the frontiersmen in the 1800s such as the Comanche. We focused a lot on slavery in the territories of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, and on slavery after the legislation focusing on popular sovereignty being passed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but we didn’t look much at how specifically Native Americans developed in reservations after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, especially in the 1900s. I wish we had gone in depth a little bit to see exactly how the Native American culture developed. I also wish we had spent a longer time looking at specific battles during the World Wars. I would have liked to look at the turning points of the World Wars, such as the Battle of the Somme in the World War I extra credit movie, and look at more of these in class. I would liked to go over their causes and effects, their results, not necessarily the military strategy that was involved with them. Because we didn’t really look at this, in my mind, it made the World Wars seem more like one event when in fact there were multiple steps and stages during it, which we didn’t really go over. I did feel that there were different effects and results after the wars, and different causes before the wars, in different stages, but I didn’t feel that same complexity or different stages during the wars, especially for World War II because I didn’t watch the extra credit film, and I wish I had.

    3. Yep, we studied a lot this year. I wish we had studied less on Reagan just because of the fact that I remember it being kind of repetitive at one point. We watched a movie about the Cold War, Reagan, and Gorbachev, for two days, and while it was interesting, we had already gone in-depth with the PowerPoint, and gotten a nice general overview with some specifics. I think the movie gave some extra details that were necessary for the understanding of what happened, and didn’t further my understanding. Furthermore, I also remember reading a packet on Reagan and the Sun Belt, and while it did talk about other factors in Reagan’s presidency, such as Reaganomics, a lot of it focused on the Cold War with Reagan’s foreign policy and his unnecessary spending of the federal budget to try and create SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative), Star Wars to shoot down the Soviet’s nuclear missiles, which he refused to give up, but never ended up creating. This packet was even repetitive for the other parts of Reagan’s presidency as we had already gone over Reaganomics in the PowerPoint, as well as what was happening with the federal budget. It did add some details here and there, but I believed the cost of learning these was greater than the benefit as it took a lot of time out of our learning. I also wish we had studied less about the specific battles of the Civil War. In this unit, we had to make our own Power Points, each group of students focusing on one part of the Power Point. When talking about the battles, we went extremely in-depth, especially with military strategy, flanking, soldiers, troops… It sometimes got me lost. This was also true for the Battle of Saratoga in the Revolutionary War, in which I did not completely understand what happened, but understood the results of the battle and its effects well, as well as its causes. I feel like this is what we should be able to understand, not necessarily military strategy, so I felt as if we sometimes did too much of that

    4. As a student, I was strong at analyzing text, writing essays, straight fact questions on test, and voicing out my ideas. For example, I did well on the portraits, answering the questions and putting in my input as well. I also did well on the writing in this class, including the Short Answer Questions, the Document-Based Questions, and the Long Essay Questions, voicing out my ideas clearly and concisely. Furthermore, I did well on tests in general, but especially if it was asking for a straight fact. I also did somewhat well on analyzing questions on a document such as a piece of writing or political cartoon, but sometimes I had guessed in between multiple answers, and some were harder to analyze than others. I was weak in answering reading comprehension questions on books, and in shortening down my ideas to a limited amount of time for things such as the Eulogy speech and the presidential debates, or even essays. For example, even though I did voice out my opinions clearly and well on the Short Answer Questions, the Document-Based Questions, and the Long Essay Questions, I sometimes ran out of time, or had too much too say, ending up in half-thought out opinions with complete opinions written down. Also, I sometimes did somewhat poorly on reading quizzes because some of the older vocabulary in books such as The Jungle by Upton Sinclair made it hard to understand, and the questions being asked in a different manner than the book would make it hard to understand because I sometimes understood the vocabulary used in the book, but not in the question in the quiz.

    5. APUSH, because it required a lot of work and effort, was a valuable experience in which important skills were obtained that will serve not only for history, but for any subject, including analyzing pieces of text, being able to voice out your opinion in a clear, concise way that is easy to follow, being able to connect different pieces of information that may seem unrelated together through common points, and being able to use evidence to support a point, an opinion, and then being able to elaborate on that point. About American history, or the content provided in APUSH, I have learned that there is no true black or white, always a different shade of grey, however dark or light it may be; this means that there are always different ways to view one event, nothing being right or wrong completely in every single view it is seen in.
13. Beau Lerner June 13, 2017 at 8:47 pm

    1. My favorite learning style this year was learning by activities, such as when you went out of your way to have us learn about the period, such as when we played Oregon Trail as a class or when we picked Cotton. My least favorite way to learn was by watching the videos, as all the history channel videos were incredibly boring and monotonous.

    2.I wish that we had spent a little bit more time covering the 2000’s, maybe talking more about the 2008 Election. Since most of us were growing up around that time, learning about that period would be able to add a lot of context to our lives that would be useful to know.

    3. The financial crisis. All that that unit did was give me a headache and make me realize i am NOT going to major in economics.

    4. My strengths as a student are definitely that I am able to participate in class a lot and I am certainly opinionated, which always makes class more fun. Of course, as you, or anybody else in my class knows, my weakness, my Achilles Heel, my Kryptonite–Google Docs. God Damned Google Docs.

    5. History is more than just the who what when and where, but a lot of it is the Why. a LOT of Apush is the why, at least.
14. Ian Rosenwasser June 13, 2017 at 9:15 pm

    1. My favorite learning style this year was the PowerPoint notes because they helped me understand topics better and study. Explaining the main points on each slide helped clear any confusion for me. Also, the chronological order of the slides made it easy to visualize a timeline for the events. I often used the PowerPoints to study because they covered each main point in a chapter. Although they weren’t the most engaging form of learning, they were useful for understanding not just facts, but why and how things happened in history. However, my least favorite method of learning was reading and taking notes on the primary sources. The sources usually had complicated language and often decreased my understanding of the time period. It was also boring to read entire sources (Common Sense, Seneca falls, etc.) and just highlight phrases periodically. I think this could be improved if we only talked about the main points or just had a discussion about the source.

    2. I think we definitely should have spent more time on the New Deal and Great Depression. These were the last things we learned and they seemed to be crammed in at the end. There were a few questions about this on the AP test, and I think I would have answered them more confidently if we had spent more time on this unit. I also think we could have spent more time on the reconstruction era. We spent a lot of time on industrialization, which was the same period, but as much on reconstruction. There was a lot of information about reconstruction on the AP, and it would have helped to have more knowledge on the time period. Lastly, I would have wanted to spend more time on the Cold War era. Although we spent a good amount of time on this unit, it’s my favorite part of history because of the constant tensions in America and the Soviet Union. There were also many astonishing events like the landing on the moon and Watergate.

    3. I wish that we had studied less of the beginning of America. This unit is important, but we went really in depth and had an LEQ and tests. I thought this was one of the more boring parts of history because there’s not much action after the revolution and before the War of 1812. I also didn’t like the John Marshall court cases because it involved a lot of reading and notes on a topic that wasn’t interesting to me.

    4. My strengths as a student are organization and time management. I’m very busy after school, but this has helped me do my homework earlier rather than waiting until the last minute. For example, I rarely did my portraits on Sunday night because I didn’t want to cram my work. I also organized my assignments so I could study from them. This helped a lot for tests because I could find the notes and documents for that chapter easily. My weaknesses as a student were tuning out during uninteresting topics and not taking notes in the beginning of APUSH. For example, when I wasn’t interested in a PowerPoint, I couldn’t focus as well as doing notes on a topic I like. Also, I didn’t take notes for some reason on the 1st 2 tests. I didn’t do well on these tests, but after, I started taking notes and my grades improved.

    5. I’ve learned that American history is a story of corruption and wrongdoings. However, through strong presidential leadership, the power of the people, and democracy America has become the great country it is today (or the great country it was, according to our president).
15. David Boarman June 13, 2017 at 9:25 pm

    1.) Personally, my favorite learning style this year was the PowerPoint lectures. Now, many others may disagree with this, but the most effective way for me to learn material is to be lectured to with some bullets up on the board, writing down additional notes. This may not be the most exciting, but it is by far the best way for me to learn and absorb information. On the contrary, my least favorite way of learning this year was watching informational videos or documentaries. The problem with these is that I had a difficult time paying attention and often found myself completely checked out. If I don’t have a teacher lecturing to me, I struggle (which I understand is a little odd, but it’s how I operate).
    2.) I think that we should have spent more time on the Great Depression. To me, it seems that we kind of just skimmed over this briefly just before the AP test, and although there was little to nothing about it on the test, it is a solid option for a DBQ in the future and therefore it’s important to cover it in more detail.
    3.) I feel that we spent too much time on the 1820s to 1850s. I remember specifically getting a PowerPoint packet that was at least 5 pages’ front on back and spending multiple weeks on this time, but I do not think that it is entirely necessary. I am not saying this time isn’t important (Mexican cession, Oregon, Mexican-American War, Jacksonian era, etc.), but the time period directly before and after it are more important, in my opinion (War of 1812 era and lead up to Civil War). Furthermore, it is important to cover thus era, but not as in depth as we did.
    4.) I believe that my main strength as a student is my ability to absorb information. I found that if I listened in class well, I was able to do well on the tests without studying, which leads me to my weakness. My main weakness was my lack of studying and serious procrastination on any homework assignments (I put the “pro” in procrastinate). I maintained a good grade in the class purely on my memory from class, and if I could apply myself and do more work outside of the classroom, I think I would do better on the class and possibly do better on the AP test.
    5.) American history is a story of messiness and atrocities, but also hope and triumph. Even through economic booms and recessions, wars and peace, the American dream is still very much alive.
16. Danielle Lutz June 13, 2017 at 9:34 pm

    1. My favorite learning style this year has been working on our assigned projects. When I spend time researching a specific topic, it allows me to focus better and retain the information much longer than simply trying to memorize facts. Additionally, by trying the different techniques, I prefer the method when the unit is split up into different groups and breaking them down into different parts. I find that my note taking is more clearly organized and easier to recall later. Since this method of projects cannot always be used, I also enjoyed the times that we were split up into sub-groups to read passages and discuss how we had HIPP-ed a specific passage. However, I did not enjoy working on the power-points. I found that I was less engaged, unless it was a topic that I had been interested in previously. When the lights are off in the classroom environment, especially in the morning, I tended to become lethargic and even tired. Since the important information was already highlighted on the slides in the power-point presentations, I did not feel the need to write down any additional details. I learned through these experiences that I prefer and absorb more information by starting with a blank piece of paper, that way I make sure to write everything down and absorb it better for the long term.
    2. While we learned some of the background and issues that lead to America participating in some of the important wars and battles, I wish we had spent more time on the specific battles, and the strategies that were used by the leaders to win the wars. Further, while we studied some of the aftermath at the conclusion of the wars, I would have enjoyed learning what life was like for everyday American’s during the wars.
    3. We spent a large amount of time this year learning about the Native Americans. We learned about the trail of tears which killed Native Americans along with bringing them into indian reservations while also learning about the battles they participated in on United States soil. In the beginning of the year, we went into depth discussing this topic for several weeks. After moving on through many different units, we came back to learning about the Native Americans. I was not particularly interested in this topic, or at least did not find it as interesting as other sections of the curriculum. I would rather spend more of our limited time on issues that are affecting our country in today’s times. I am aware that kicking the indians onto reservations and killing many of them is an important part of our society. The importance of this unit is explained to us, the students, but there was a lot of extra time spent on the subject that I would’ve prefered to discuss another topic.
    4. If I’m being completely honest, as a student in apush this year, I felt I had more weaknesses than strengths. I felt like I had a lot of trouble on the majority of the tests and I was not prepared enough to back up those test grades with A+, 100% effort, and on time homework and classwork assignments. I completed lots of extra credit opportunities that were available to me and that was extremely helpful for my grade. When I felt comfortable in class, I would participate in conversations and that was my biggest strength. I really like debating in class and sharing my opinion with everybody around me. I also like to hear everybody else’s opinions regarding American history and current events. It was great that I got lucky enough to be in apush the year of an election. There was much time spent discussing this tricky presidential race. I felt that I had a strong opinion during those discussions.
    5. I went into apush thinking I knew most of the information about American history. I was ready to crush tests and do amazing. Once the trimester started and I realized that wasn’t the case, I was nervous at first. There is a lot to American history that I did not know before this class, but know now. I realized it was a good thing I didn’t know everything because that would take out all the fun of apush! I learned so much that I did not know before and I will remember forever. Without this class, my school year would not have been the same. Thank you Mr. Wickersham for everything you taught me this year. I hope you have an amazing summer and I will miss you.
17. Emily Juriga June 13, 2017 at 9:41 pm

    1.
    My favorite learning style in APUSH this year was using the powerpoint slide notes. I thought that those worked the best for my learning and gave me visuals of what we were studying while I could write down my own notes. By writing my own notes (and having ample space to write in), I understood the material in my own way and I also had visuals with my notes, making it the ideal learning experience. By using the powerpoint and ‘lecture’ notes I heard the information and got to write it down in a way I would understand. But the learning style that was my least favorite way to learn was by using the prewritten notes. I didn’t like this form of learning because it was difficult to understand the information in its written form. The prewritten notes helped to save time, but having a block of words on a page, and having to highlight things, was not my favorite way of learning, and I frankly thought it was a drag to do.
    2.
    This school year I wished we would have covered World War 2 for a longer period of time. Maybe it’s because it is a very interesting subject to me, but I thought we could have gone deeper into World War 2 and spent an extra few days on it. World War 2 changed the world immensely, and I really would have loved to know more details about it and more of its effects on the lives of people involved in it. For some reason, I also don’t feel like I had a good enough understanding of FDR and Ike, and it felt as if we zoomed through this section of history. I know we moved at a fast pace sometimes to fit everything in, but I wish we had slowed down for this era. For example, I felt like I had a very good understanding of the happenings of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War 1, but World War 2 is kind of a blur.

    3.
    The Colonies! I think we study the colonies and people like John Winthrop for too long. Even though they helped to shape our culture and helped to shape America, I felt like our unit on the colonies could have been much shorter. All of the time between colonies settling on North America and Revolutionary war, was a time of development and growth. But I think that other time periods could have been covered instead of using time to talk about the colonies. I think we should just learn about the basics, and maybe skip out on learning about all the influential people, and maybe just learn about their values and the idea of them.

    4.

    As a student I thought that my ability to follow direction and pay attention during class benefited my grade and was a strength of mine. Also, I think another strength I had as an APUSH student was my willingness and ability to work in a group and get work done. For example, even if I was not assigned to a group with my friends in it, I still communicated and worked with my teammates very well. One strength, which I also see as a weakness, was my profuse note taking skills. I always took a lot of notes, which seemed like a good idea when I was taking them, but when it comes to study for the test on that info, I realize I could have dumbed down the info so I could study quicker (I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it’s true, too many notes weakened me). Also, I think a big weakness of mine as a student is not asking enough questions. I should have asked more questions and come up with more questions to ask Mr. Wickersham before tests, so that I had a full understanding of our study topic. Finally, as a student, and as a person, I think my fear to speak up during class discussions and agree/disagree/undecided is a weakness I have. I really hope during my high school career I can learn to voice my opinion proudly, and without fear of peer judgement.

    5.
    In APUSH this year, I have learned that people aren’t perfect, and I discovered that even the most puffed up historical celebrities and famous people have flaws. Before taking APUSH I thought about America in a very forgiving and good light, but now I know America and its history, and its mistakes, and it is learning and changing constantly. I really enjoyed this class and I will miss it very much (except for portraits, I won’t miss those).
18. Jack Walt June 13, 2017 at 9:45 pm

    1. My favorite learning style in APUSH this year was definitely power points. I love history and the many fascinating details about it, and power points covered these. Following along with Mr. Wickersham’s words and taking notes helped me comprehend the lessons the best. The note taking allowed me to use my own language and when I looked back it, I remembered it better than textbook lessons. I think that the least effective learning style for me was the printed notes that we would read and highlight in class. I felt that the bullet points were not interesting and only summarized the subjects. I had a harder time studying lessons that we had learned through printed notes because I was not motivated to look back at the boring handouts. When I looked back at my own notes based on what I took away from Mr. Wickersham’s explanation, it was more interesting and easier to comprehend.

    2. I wish we spent more time on the Obama presidency and his accomplishments. We briefly looked at his policies in an AP exam study session, but that was it. I feel that the precedents he set were very significant and will be looked at in history as so. The 2016 election seemed to contain the entire modern political focus, but I wish we would’ve had time to examine the changes in the last eight years. I also would’ve liked to look into the battles of the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. I think some of the strategies and generals are very interesting and to hear more about them would have been cool.

    3. I truly think that we didn’t study any unit too much. In fact, sometimes I thought we were too brief with some subjects and thought there was more to learn. If I had to choose one however, it would be the time period leading up to the Civil War. I don’t think we overly learned about this subject, but it was not interesting to me, therefore it went by slowly and I had trouble paying attention in class.

    4. I think one of my major strengths as a student was my work ethic. Throughout the year, I put a lot of effort into every homework assignment, project and study session. I missed a lot of class from sickness and sports, but was usually good about getting missed work and making up tests. Sometimes it was hard, but I was determined to keep up with the sometimes massive workload that we received in APUSH. A weakness for me this year was procrastination. I often found myself working very late into the night before a long portrait was due or a test. My performance was usually good, but it made for a sleepy and bad feeling next day.

    5. APUSH has taught me that we are a country of immigrants, from the Pilgrim days to modern day, there are always new waves of immigration.
19. Bryce Ulep June 13, 2017 at 10:31 pm

    1. I thought the worst way of learning was in the middle of the year when we had to research our own topics and make slides and present about them. I personally was fine with PowerPoints and all though they were getting a bit boring, it is history class so it is almost unavoidable. I also thought that the slides gave us worse of a chance on the test as people could not explain things as well as the teacher. Mr. Wickersham knows more history than all the kids in our class combined and can answer almost every follow up question which was unachievable by the students. Kid’s need these follow up questions to be answered to stay engaged and interested.
    2. I wish we spent more time on the Civil War battles. I enjoy learning about wars and battle tactics used by different generals and military commanders in the past. I find the ideas that some people have strategy wise very interesting and I wish we could have spent more time on that. I also wish we would have spent more time learning about the minorities throughout U.S. History. Being a minority myself I felt as though most of the time we just covered the most important thing with the rich white people but did not go very in depth with the common man or minorities throughout the states.
    3. I wish we learned less about the feminist movements, and current feminist movements. I feel that throughout history feminists have never been happy with their rights b8ut at the same time I feel as though they never will be. We spent a lot of time on early feminists like Susan B. Anthony and their equal rights movements, and also a lot of time in newer movements. I think that all the movements are just trying to accomplish the same thing and it’s not worth spending valuable time before the A.P. test learning the same things over and over again. I also did not like spending so many days watching ’Tough Guise’ and ‘Killing us Slowly’. These movies were kind of just a time filler where we could have been learning about other things rather than spending time learning about things we already covered in earlier history.
    4. I would say that some of my strengths as a student are that I don’t allow political views to influence my ethics. I am not a conservative or a liberal but am on a fine line in between which I think is good because it does not bind me to one side of an argument all the time. Some weaknesses of mine include test preparation, and hard work. I am a very lazy person and that is something I need to work on. I need to make sure all my assignments are done and on time in the correct spot by their due date which I do not always do. I also need to prepare for tests more efficiently and proactively. If I’m being completely honest, I’ve never studied for a single test in my life which I need to start doing because it will be a vital skill in my future. I need to get a good study strategy and good study material so that I’m able to do better on my tests and other assignments.
    5. One of my biggest takeaways of this class wasn’t so much about the actual history as a subject but more about my work style. Through this class I’ve done more reading, writing, and typing than I have do ne in any other class and it’s made me a more efficient worker. Another takeaway I got from this class is the amount of work and focus I will need for an A.P. class. It shows me that I need to work very hard and not blow small assignments off as every point is important in the long run for my overall grade.
20. Rania Abbasi June 13, 2017 at 10:36 pm

    1. My favorite learning style this year, even though it was time-consuming, was doing the PowerPoints. I like them because we are able to discuss the topics as a class and elaborate on the information presented in the slide. They usually end up provoking a long class discussion which I find extremely interesting and beneficial (most of the time). When we talk about things aloud, I can form connections in my head and apply it in tests. My least favorite way of learning was highlighting notes. I didn’t find this beneficial at all for me because it was just you or another classmate reading the notes aloud; with occasional comments from you saying to highlight a certain passage. Although it was okay in some cases, I would much have preferred doing PowerPoints.

    2. I kind of wish we spent more time on the Great Depression and the New Deal. Although I don’t think this is the most interesting topic we were learning about, I do think we kind of squeezed it into a couple days and could’ve gone more in depth to the causes and effects of this time period; because of the tremendous implications it had on our modern-day society. I think we also could have spent more time on the Mexican-American War, because all we did was go over notes for it. We spent quite a lot of time on other things, and I think the amount of time was allocated pretty equally for most of the chapters.
    3. I think we should have spent less time on the very beginning with the colonies, even though that’s very important. We spent almost a month talking about people like Anne Hutchinson and the different colony areas (Chesapeake, New England, Southern, Middle). It’s a bit too much time for something that’s barely on the AP test at all.

    4. I think I had a lot of strengths and weaknesses as a student. More weaknesses, to be honest. I think at some points I just became lazy and didn’t do certain things on time. Other times I simply didn’t manage my time properly and ended up pushing all my assignment to the last day. I began out the year with doing very poorly on all my tests, but ended 2nd tri with an A-. I thought that was pretty good for me. I think I just had to find the right way to study for myself, which was taking notes on Jocz Productions videos, and explaining the powerpoint and google docs out loud. A strength this year for me, I believe, was my writing. I did quite well on all the DBQs, but kind of slipped up on the LEQs a bit. The DBQs were one of my favorites actually because I was able to take what I learned, look at actual documents in front of me, and then apply what I learned.

    5. Through APUSH, I learned that history really does repeat itself; especially since we were in this class during the 2016 presidential election. A lot of the things that we were learning sounded very familiar in today’s context. That’s my main takeaway of history, but of the class; I learned how to think more critically and understand the world around me better. This definitely was my favorite class this year, even if I had some slips in my grades.
21. Chloe Brasch June 13, 2017 at 10:44 pm

    1.Personally, my favorite style of learning within the classroom would be watching an informative video with notes to turn in afterwards. This style of learning was effective for me in more ways than one. For me, I find myself more likely to pay attention to something that is being presented in front of me and videos definitely accomplished that goal. The notes that are required, whether it be Questions, Facts, Hashtags or a fill in the blank type of worksheet that corresponds to the video, are a great reminder to pay attention to what is being presented and it also doesn’t hurt that they add points into the gradebook. The videos we watched this year were for the most part really interesting and are easier to follow (in my opinion) rather than reading information straight out of the text book and taking notes. In contrast, my least favorite learning technique was reading the text book. This strategy proved non-useful for me when preparing for tests or trying to grasp information. I found myself not being able to obtain the information found in the textbook as well as I could when watching informative videos.

    2.Coming into APUSH, I looked forward to studying more current times such as the 90s and 2000s. Throughout this course, we spent much of our time studying everything up to 90’s-2000s’ until right after the A.P. exam. Although we spent about two weeks on this time period, I was very intrigued by it and wish we had the opportunity and the time to study more because I find myself being able to enjoy and comprehend this information more easily than I do with later times in American history. Because we spent so little time on this topic, I felt slightly rushed with the information and wish we could have spent another week or so going more into depth about what was presented to us.

    3.Throughout this past year, I wish we didn’t go into such depth about the Native Americans. I feel like the entire summer homework dealt with the Native Americans and the many bad interactions they encountered with the Europeans and many others. The Native Americans also appear to show up in multiple other events throughout American history and I remember having to learn about them during the summer along with the many other chapters we covered this year. I never found myself being all that interesting with the Natives history in America and it felt repetitive having to learn about them so often. I wish we could have made use of our time learning different topics of diving deeper into topics we had only briefly discussed.

    4.My strengths during my APUSH career would definitely include completing my work on time. As a high school student, managing extracurricular activities along with the homework in other classes is a skill one must master. I feel that I have mastered this skill and have made it a priority to complete my work in this class thoroughly and meet a timeline. It is very important to me that I keep up with the homework assignments in order to understand the curriculum being taught and I feel that I have succeeded in doing so. One of my weakness in this class, however, is being able to perform on the tests. I find myself feeling high stress when it all comes down to expressing my knowledge on what we have previously studied and that weakness has ultimately effected my ability to be successful when it comes to tests.

    5. My main takeaway from APUSH is that America is built upon greed, corruption, and wrongdoings. However, past mistakes have led to change and are a learning experience.
22. Grace Jung June 14, 2017 at 1:29 am

    1. I think that the best way to learn the amount of information that we had to learn was the way that you set up in the first place. The power point slides that you put up really helped and the fact that we have to write in the notes and we got to decide on what to write really helped us. I think that the power point is the best way to go because it’s not exactly a lecture because the way that you set it up allowed people to discuss about the topic and ask questions that they had. It also would stick better in my head if I wrote down the information that you were saying. But I do think that you can slow down a little because most of the time I couldn’t get a lot of the things you were saying because you went so quickly. I also think with the power points it wasn’t as boring as a lecture and would keep people awake enough for them to soak up the knowledge. I, personally, did not like the movie notes. The movie notes did not stick in my head because I was so worried that I would miss information that I would just write what I heard. I also think that the movie notes just added more detail to the events that we were learning on and didn’t really touch on the things that we learned in class. I also think that the movie notes were really boring and I couldn’t really find a way to incorporate it into my studying for upcoming tests. This year we had a good handful of movies and I never really used it to study, and personally, I saw them as a waste of time because I was never going to use the notes anyway.

    2. I wish that we spent more time on the early 1900’s. I remember right before our AP exam we had to cram in the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl because we focused so much time on the Wars and certain presidencies that we didn’t get time to focus on one of the greatest downfalls of our economy. I thought the Great Depression was pretty important because it’s such a well known topic and moment in history that I thought we would focus on it more, but we didn’t. I also think that the Great Depression is a pretty important part of America’s history. I wanted to learn more about how Americans were affected, what did the president do to keep peace within our country during this time of panic, and what happened after the panic settled. We just had a power point and quickly ran through it in a day, because the next day was the AP exam. This topic didn’t come up in the AP exam but it could have and I would not have been ready to answer anything regarding that time period if it had come up.

    3. I don’t think that anything should be shortened but just managed and spaced out enough so that we can learn everything without having to cram in at the end of the tri before the exam. But if we were to shorten a part of the information that we learned throughout this year, it would have to be the beginning information about the Tribes and the beginning of America, like the early early beginning of America. All the homework that you assigned over the summer didn’t really come up in our exam and the beginning stuff I’m pretty sure only makes up about 5-10% of the exam. We focused on it a lot and I think it was a little unnecessary. I remember having to read and write a lot about this time period, but it wasn’t really useful during the test. I think if it were to be shortened a little that it probably won’t harm the future generation of APUSH students. But other than that I think that all the other topics that we touched on were long enough for us to absorb it all, especially the wars. I think that the way that you set it up for us to learn a lot about the wars really helped us in the long run with our exam because a lot of questions had to do with some type of war or conflict.

    4. I don’t really think I had any strengths in this class. But I think what really helped me do okay, was my ability to pay attention in class and try to learn as much information I can through the power points, book, and the youtube videos that you linked. I had a lot of information at my fingertips that I could use to study and it really helped me through this year. I think that another strength of mine would be participating in conversations in class. I think that because a lot of my friends were in the same class with me that I was able to participate and say the things I wanted to say. I was able to raise my hand and ask questions when I was confused and that allowed me to clear up any information that I misinterpreted. But I have to admit that I had a lot of weaknesses in this class. I think that my unwillingness to study hurt my grade a lot. I had the resources available to me and the notes that I carefully wrote out so I would be able to look over them again, but I never really used them. Before this class I never studied for tests and got A’s but this class helped me really study. It might not have been a good year but I did learn a lot about my bad studying habits. An example of my unwillingness, would be the first test we ever took. I thought I would be okay without studying but I completely bombed the test and had to retake.

    5. I learned that American history is a lot more complicated than it is made out to be. There’s so many things that shaped how our country is today and that it will keep on changing. Through this class I also learned that history isn’t just straight forward, there are crevices that are still to be looked at. I also learned that America isn’t all that it is hyped up to be but by looking at our past mistakes, maybe someday, it will be.
23. Emma Marszalek June 14, 2017 at 7:09 am

    1.I enjoyed taking the powerpoint notes. They helped me figure out what was more important than others. I did not enjoy you given us the written out notes. I felt like I couldn’t retain the information because I wasn’t physically writing down the notes. The powerpoint notes helped me do this because I had to pay attention to get good notes. I also enjoyed the videos. They were a good break from the regular notes even though they had educational value. They were very interesting to listen to. Writing the notes down helped me to remember them, and also it was easier to study from because it was in my own words.

    2. I wish we spent more time on a timeline because throughout the year I became confused on the president order and what events happened after one another. I wish we spent more time on the early 1800s as that was most of our AP test and I was fully prepared for industrialization and post WWI. The early 1800s was an important time and it would have been nice to go over one last time to fully clear up which event happened when it did. But other than that I liked the way we did the more modern stuff in the beginning of the year. It made that harder past stuff easier to understand as we continued our writing.

    3. I wish we studied less of reconstruction. For me, it was an easier topic and it wasn’t hard to fully comprehend. Reconstruction was important but I feel like we didn’t have to learn all of the different parts of it, as it was kind of confusing. The industrialization was also a topic I felt was drawn out. Not your fault but, it did not appear on the AP test and I thought we went too in depth and we could have gotten the whole view with less information. Both of these topics are important to American history but I feel as if we did not need to spend as much time as them as we did.

    4. My strengths were note taking and understanding information as a whole. As we learned the details in class, I was able to learn the main topics of the information but tended not to remember the specific details. This was a good and bad thing as on tests I would understand the full concept of the question but struggle to answer the more specific ones. A weakness of mine was understanding the passages on the test. I would get confused and overthink the passage making me answer incorrectly. I wish we would have spent a little more time learning how to understand this information that is given to us in a big blurb.

    5. I learned that history repeats itself. Commonly I found similarities between what has happened in the past and why it is important to learn from. I also learned that I love to learn about history, even though it may have not seemed like it. I really enjoyed the pace of this class and how it challenged me to further myself in my learning about American history. I was able to learn things that I might not have in regular history classes. So thank you for that.
24. Jackson Blau June 14, 2017 at 8:42 am

    1. Personally, this year I feel that my favorite learning style that we utilized was watching videos. This is because the videos show you lots of information in a way that appeals to the viewer. For me, I learn very well from this style. I believe this is because I take good notes and try to comprehend everything the video throws at me. My least favorite learning style we utilized was reading. This was because for me at least, it is very boring. I would be able to start the reading and take great notes in the beginning. Then progressively throughout the reading I would become more and more bored and my notes would start having worse quality the more I read. This low-quality note taking and bored feeling from the reading is the reason that this strategy didn’t work for me.
    2. This year I would’ve liked to have spent more time on World War Two and the Holocaust. This is because, being Jewish, I would’ve enjoyed learned more specifics about the Holocaust. I already knew most of the broad details from religious school and hoped we would learn different aspects of the Holocaust more thoroughly. I believe that knowing more about this topic could’ve benefitted everybody in the class but more specifically the Jewish students so they could really relate to their heritage.
    3. In my opinion, I believe we spent too much time on the pre-Declaration of Independence America. This is because I feel that times have changed so much that most historical lessons that can be learned from this time period are out dated. The world has evolved and the times are just too different to even be applicable today. By saying this I am not trying to imply that we shouldn’t learn about the founding of our country, I am trying to say it could be covered less in depth. For example, I don’t believe that memorizing the different taxes Great Britain had placed on the colonies was important, I believe we would’ve just been fine knowing that Great Britain heavily taxed the colonies.
    4. My strengths as a student are my abilities to remember content and to work efficiently. Once I write something down once, I typically have it memorized. This is a huge benefit to me as it takes away a lot of time that most students have to spend studying. I am a really efficient worker in the sense that I work quickly and still produce quality work. I think this is strength because it allows me more time to correct work and make sure it is the way I want. My biggest weakness as a student is my lack of work ethic. I believe that if I took the time out of my day to study the amount a normal student does, my grades would benefit greatly. But being a student athlete, I truly don’t have the time or mental capacity to do this. I come home from school then go straight to practice, then dinner then homework so I usually don’t get to homework till around 9:00. I also need a lot of sleep as a student athlete, I try to be asleep by 11:00 every night so that leaves two hours maximum for homework and me to relax.
    5. For APUSH I learned more about my country than I had ever thought I could. I also learned that history really is complicated but understanding it has huge benefits.The class was very beneficial to me and I believe will positively benefit me in the future.
25. Jordan Shefman June 14, 2017 at 8:42 am

    1. Over the course of the year, we have taken a bunch of notes, mainly in two different forms. The first is PowerPoint notes, and the second, where the information is presented in paragraphs and we are responsible for highlighting the important parts. I liked the PowerPoints better because the information was presented in a form that made it easier to retain. It was more spread out instead of having to take in a while chapters worth of information in a shorter amount of time. We also watched movies. With movies, we either took guided notes, questions-facts-hashtags notes, or were able to watch it freely. I enjoyed when we were able to watch freely without taking any notes because it allowed me to lay more attention to the movie instead of worrying about taking good notes. The thing that I liked the most was the whole class discussion. It was beneficial to hear others opinions on current events as well as past ones the get a different side of the story. I think that is where I learned a lot of the things that I did. It was helpful to hear it from another source who maybe put it into different terms. My least favorite way of learning was the highlighting notes. I found it very easy to lose focus and just highlight what we were told to without giving it a deeper thought. It was not difficult to start day dreaming for me with this tactic.

    2. I wish we spent more time on World War I and the Great Depression. While I understand that this is an American History class and this is a world war, not only did America play a large role, but it also affected us. I think that it was something that we should have spent more than 3 days on, similar to when we learned about World War II. We spent more time learning about that. Also, the Great Depression, a very significant detail in history, with many causes and effects, was only taught for a day. I think that it would have been beneficial to spend a little more time on that. I also wish that we would have learned the history in order, instead of jumping to WWII and then going back. It messed up the timeline in my head because we learned about Nixon, the 37th president, before we learned about Jackson, the 7th.

    2. I didn’t really think we went too in depth into any topic. Everything we learned about was important and deserved the amount of time we studied it for. If I had to choose one thing, it would probably be the two videos, ToughGuise and Killing Us Softly, only because I didn’t really understand how they related to American history. But otherwise. The class wbet at a fairly fast pace and I think we didn’t spend too much time on things that we shouldn’t have.

    3. As a student, I would definitely say that I had more weaknesses than strengths. One strength that I did have, however, was not procrastinating. This is a class where a lot of people put homework off until 20 minutes before it was due, but in my case, I always tried to do the homework as soon as it was available. One the other hand, my weaknesses alone could go on for 400 words, so I’ll stick to two. Firstly, I had trouble retaining the information for tests. I would study the night before, know the info the next morning, and my mind would go blank during the tests. Also, I was pretty bad at analyzing the passages on tests. Being that the tests in this class were primarily primary source based, that is something that I wish I was better at. That’s not to say that this class didn’t improve my skills, I just feel that I should have practiced that a little more.

    4. APUSH is a class to learn your strengths and weaknesses. While I did learn A TON about American history, I think what his class really taught me was how to study, as well as how to budget my time. While I may not have received the grades in this class that I normally would receive in other classes, I don’t regret taking it as it taught me more than just American history. However, with that being said, the one thing about American history that I did learn is that, as Americans, we are always fighting someone. Whether it be Britain for our freedom, Germany in WWI, or ourselves in the Civil War, there was rarely a time of peace in this country.
26. Jacob Kroll June 14, 2017 at 9:23 am

    1. My favorite learning style this year was definitely the debates. They were extremely engaging and drew ideas that allowing my perspective to enlarge. I got to see the views and grow a deeper insight on whatever topic we are talking about. When I’m engaged in a learning activity where I can use my own voice helps me a lot. My least favorite way to learn this year was by far the videos. They didn’t really teach me much about the topic, and it felt like I was reading an old source (which I also disliked reading). They were hard to follow, except OJ.
    2. This year I would much rather had us spend more time on the great depression, before, and after. We spent a lot of time on every chapter, but since we ran out of time at the end of the year we kind of brushed over the great depression. I know about the 1700’s in depth but not the early 1900’s very well. Overall I believe we spent a good amount of time on every topic though.
    3. I believe we stayed on every topic the correct amount of time we should have. APUSH is very thorough and to understand every chapter of American history you need to spend the time on it. If there was one chapter that I believe we should have spent less time on it would be the civil rights period, such as the 50’s and 60’s. I don’t know exactly how long, but I remember spending quite a bit of time on this era.
    4. My strengths as a student were speaking to the class, the quizzes, and participating. I’m not very strong overall in the area of APUSH. I have many weaknesses: DBQ’s, SAQ’s, LEQ’s, Tests, and Homework. This is the most intense class I have taken, and it was definitely a roller coaster of a class. I have never consecutively taken L’s on this many tests in a row before.
    5. I learned almost everything about American history. Now whenever I’m in a trivia contest I can pick that category. I think the most important takeaway is how to deal with, and take a real AP course. This class readied me for future classes with reading skills, and test taking skills that I will use for my future scholastic career. This class was overall hell but I would never give it up.
27. Lily Meinel June 14, 2017 at 9:27 am

    1. My least favorite way to learn this year was watching movies and taking notes. I did not really like the question facts and hashtags that much because I could not absorb the movie. The movies were good but I felt like I had to write down every detail in the movie. This does not work for me because I could not get all of the fact from the movie written down. I learned more from writing down notes because it really sticks to my brain when I write things down. And because I felt like I had to write everything down in the movie and I could not enjoy it and truly listen to it. I just felt stressed about writing things down.
    2. I wish we spent more time on the progressive movement. I find that era the most interesting. We did spend a lot of time on it but I would just like to know more about the era. I find it interesting about how the working immigrants were treated so poorly and nothing happened. I would like to know more about andrew carnegie and how he became a global superpower. I would have like to go more in depth to the big businessmen back then because they are ruthless. I want to know how they got so greedy. I just find i fascinating that era in general.
    3. I wish we studied less of was the colonies. I think we did way too much about them. I did not like how much we learned about who the colonies were made and their morals in the colonie. I did not need to know that much about Jamestown about the John Winthrop. They were important to learn about but just not in that much detail.
    4. My weakness was not studying last minute. I would stay up really late every night before a test. I would procrastinate all the time for this class. My strengths were taking good notes in class. I would really listen in class and pay close attention to details. I wrote down basically everything.
    5. My take aways are that i can take really great notes in class. I also learn not to procrastinate for studying for any test. I also learned that a bad grade does not define you and it does not make you less smart. I learned to deal with a bad grade better than i use to. I am very thankful for that because i would get so worried about a bad grade but that grade is not my final grade. That is all i care about now is my final grade.
    ps we have not started the final yet
28. Stav D June 14, 2017 at 10:40 am

    1.) My favorite learning style this year was the PowerPoints. Despite them being a little dry, it really is the best way to learn. This worked for me because I got direct information and it makes learning a massive amount of information a little simpler. I think the PowerPoints were also the most organized style of learning and therefore they gave the most information possible. I was not a fan of reading the outside books (Fredrick Douglas, the things they carried, the jungle) because it was hard for me to apply this to a bigger picture of APUSH. I saw these stories as just one story out of millions and that made it feel like they weren’t significant enough to learn about and spend so much time reading them.
    2.) I felt like the WW1 and Great Depression were a little too brushed over on. It would’ve been nice to look into both of these more, especially WW1 because it can get confusing. More specifically, imperialism and its effects were taken a little too fast for me and they appeared on the AP test a few times so I would have liked to study those a little more in depth.
    3.) I felt as though we spent forever getting through the Cold War. I think this information was important and there is a lot to learn, but we went so in depth that I would’ve like to have saved some of that time and used it for WW1. Also, since the information in that time period is less likely to appear on the AP test (35% as opposed to 45% for the WW1 stuff) I think it would be more beneficial to spend more time on that stuff.
    4.) My strengths as an APUSH student were that I was good at managing my time and not having to spend long nights cramming for APUSH. I did portraits relatively early, finished google docs before they were due, and spent time preparing for tests in advance. That being said, my biggest weakness as a student was that I never really figured out how to study for a Wickersham style test. Even when I knew all the information possible, I never got good at those passages.
    5.) In terms of my knowledge of US history, my biggest takeaway is that America is ever changing and that’s a good. When the country first started with English settlers, it was still being ruled by a king. Then America decided to change and have a revolution. America then had slaves for years, then civil war broke out and change again. Then America industrialized and changed lives of its people. Then once again, America changed and left its isolationist past and joined WW1. Then Civil rights movements changed the lives of the oppressed citizens. Now today, we are going through more changes with giving rights to women, LGBTQ people, and people who are being discriminated against. My biggest takeaway therefore was that America will forever need changes, and its ability to change is crucial to a good society.
29. Lindsay Martin June 14, 2017 at 10:44 am

    As a student, powerpoints really helped me. It made it easier to understand what the reading was about, and your anecdotes about the president made it easier to remember. But the most helpful thing was the Socratic seminars. It was more engaging, and more opinions were explored. The conversation led to questions, which cleared up the material. When you have to speak, more effort is put into preparing, and more students actually do the reading. So putting your students in situations with the possibility of embarrassing themselves will help engagement in the class. My least favorite way of learning was reading our textbook. The sentences were confusing and hard to follow. Many people gave up on reading quickly (thank goodness for review videos!).
    I think we covered most material well, but the biggest issue for me was the order in which we learned it. Yes, it was easier to learn the newer material from the documents, but I would mix up the timeline. This made it harder to study come the AP test. If you keep the order the same, a good idea would be to tell your students to create a large timeline, so that their history doesn’t get mixed up. If I had to pick a topic to go more in depth into, it would be the presidents. This could help with the timeline- knowing which president goes where. The presidential debate helped jog my memory, but it took some cues to remember the details.
    The industrial age unit felt like it lasted forever. Sure, afterwards I felt like I knew everything about textile mills and monopolies, but the details I knew were excessive. It was a really interesting period, but come the AP test, I was an expert on that and not much else.
    One of my strengths as a student was my memory. I can remember details pretty easily, and even if I tune out, I can process the information I hear. But my main issue was my work ethic. I had issues motivating myself to study or do the homework, and outside of school my life was so chaotic I struggled to find time to do it. But this issue isn’t just contained to apush, in order to be successful I need to get rid of my phone and grab my planner. Taking time to sit down and do work (when I did this) actually really helped.
    I learned that America has been having the same arguments about policy from the beginning. History truly does repeat itself.
30. Ashley A June 14, 2017 at 10:57 am

    1. My most favorite learning style this year was watching videos because it’s kept me attentive and I understood more of the details and information being given because there was no way for me to skim a movie. My least favorite learning style is writing because it gave a lot of anxiety and it cramped my hand up really bad. Also, I find writing more of a “write as much as you can in this format” type of activity not much of an apply what you have learned about a topic.
    2.I wish that we learned more about the Native Americans. I feel that the majority of our learning was about after the Europeans took their land and how they suffered so much for that happening but I would like to learn more about how they prospered before the Europeans. I would like to learn more about this because I believe that Native american history is still American history and that it’s worth learning the culture of how America was before it was America.
    3.I wish that we learned less about the colonies and the period after Christopher Columbus to the revolution. I feel that it dragged on and on and that it was a bit repetitive. However, the information that we learned about this period did appear multiple times throughout the year all the way until the AP test. So if it will show that often next year, it may be worth spending a lot of time on so the information really sticks.
    4. My strength as a student is using small facts to infer on information presented in front of me. I have a tendency to jumble up the major details of an event but the insignificant situations tend to have more prominence in my brain. The information that is retained, whether important or unimportant, is useful because it makes eliminating answers or possibilities on test or in writing much easier. My weakness as a student was procrastination. Though it got much better as the year progressed, I often found myself doing portraits in the middle of the night and turning google docs at 9:58.
    5. APUSH taught me that history often repeats though values and morals change all the time. The class gave me more control over my anxiety in public speaking or when time is almost up. Also, I learned from learning American history that there are multiple views on the same thing and that they often differ and it is important to learn to agree to disagree.
31. Hank Peters-Wood June 14, 2017 at 1:42 pm

    1) The strategy that helped me learn best this year in APUSH was open class discussion (Agree, Disagree, Undecided, debates, or just discussion and reflection). I really enjoyed this strategy, because it helped me grasp a concept or belief from multiple points of view and I was able to speak myself. If I wasn’t sure about something, I was able to sit back and think on it, while also thinking about others people’s responses, until I was able to understand something or make an idea of my own. I love to spread my own views and just talk about or debate anything, so this style was both fun and benefits for me.

    2) Throughout this year, we learned about many subjects that were very interesting to me. If I had to choose one that I wish we had spent more time on, I would choose the space race. We did cover this subject during our unit on Kennedy and the Cold War, but I wish we had dug a little bit deeper into our first trip to the moon. This was a huge event for the whole country and also a big victory, and I think it is very interesting to learn about how influential and popular this event is. The Apollo 11 mission was made up of very famous astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and the whole lead up to and the mission itself is very interesting. We did go over this subject, but I wish we had dug a bit deeper into it.

    3) Along with all the interesting stuff we learned, there was also some boring stuff. Personally, the unit that interested me the least was the Gilded Age. Because if how vast this time period is, the unit seemed to drag on forever and I just wasn’t really interested in anything in it. The famous entrepreneurs, industrial revolution, and early women’s rights movement are all very significant, but they just didn’t amuse me as much as the rest of the stuff we learned.

    4) As a student, I would say that I have a decent amount of strengths. In this class particularly, I am naturally drawn to the subject, I am very good st succeeding without much background knowledge or a ton of work, I am enthusiastic and optimistic, and I make good choices when it comes to prioritizing.
    To be specific, with our final presentation, I brought a very positive attitude and tried to make it fun, and I did very well of thinking on the fly in overtime.
    In terms of weakness, I often find myself procrastinating way too much and I sometimes have a lack of determination. This hurts me because it often leads to a lack of perpetration.
    To be specific, there were multiple times throughout the year when I was doing my portraits and the last minute or when I should have studied harder for a test or quiz, and these are things that I must change for next year.

    5) My biggest takeaway from this year in APUSH, is that American History isn’t completely pretty. Our history is full of evils and mistakes, and despite what politicians tell us, our history is not full of victory and we haven’t always been the greatest country on earth. This being said, I believe we have learned from these evils and mistakes and that for all of the bad things, our nation has just as many (if not more) positives and successes, which is the reason that we are one of the greatest nations on earth. We are often told about the good stories of America, but there is more to the picture; our country has a complicated and intricate history which has resulted in where we are today.
32. Brett Hutchison June 14, 2017 at 3:59 pm

    1.) My favorite learning style this year was the one time when we got to make our own notes for when we were studying the Civil War and had to present to the class. I thought it was fun to basically be the teacher for a few minutes and tell everyone else about whatever subject I chose to study and present to the class. I also thought it was better to study a section of the unit on my own from different sources because I get a better understanding from different sources by learning about the same thing, but in different writing styles. My least favorite method was annotating papers because, with only a few minutes to look over the papers, they were sometimes difficult to read and understand, especially if they were older sources written in the style that was common in some time like the 1700s.
    2.) I wish we had gone more in depth on the Great Depression, FDR’s New Deal, and the 1930s in general. I think this era is very important in American history because it was the worst depression in US history and it affected nearly every American in some way, with the economy not entirely recovering until WWII started (a period of over ten years). In addition, FDR’s New Deal set the standard for modern American liberalism and led to the recovery of the Democratic Party after decades of being overshadowed by the Republican Party.
    3.) I wish we spent less time on the Progressive Era because I feel we spent a lot of time focusing on specific acts of reform when they could have all been summed up in a shorter period of time, and maybe more on how the Progressive Era played out in the long term because I think that is just as important as the fact that reforms were introduced at all. In addition, I think this era is overshadowed by bigger, more important and influential events that come later such as WWI, the Great Depression, and the Roaring Twenties.
    4.) My strengths as a student were being able to develop an effective and well-organized studying strategy where I would start studying several days before the test and knowing what to cover and how to best remember the information; that worked out well for the most part, for both tests and finals. Another strength of mine was forgetting when certain assignments were due, which was a problem at the end of the year. My weaknesses were sometimes forgetting about some things, like the Portrait essays, and occasional cases of procrastination where I decided to not do well when working on an assignment or studying for a test or quiz. Sometimes in class I did not participate as much as I should have, which was a problem that I confronted throughout the year and I do not have as much trouble with now.
    5.) One of my takeaways from being in APUSH was being able to develop a deeper understanding of US history and being able to know why certain things happened. I also learned that many events in American history had deeper causes that were far more complex and confusing than I had previously thought, and, just as importantly, I learned that the US is not always as democratic (an example being suffrage for only white, landowning men from the nation’s beginning) and fair as I thought, but that many people have suffered or have not had a fair shot at moving up in society due to a variety of factors. I learned how to analyze situations and understand the context of a speech or a booklet, which is a skill that may come in handy later for things like the SAT or ACT, and how to improve my writing style.
33. Kate Marszalek June 14, 2017 at 5:04 pm

    1) My favorite learning style is when we have meaningful discussions on the effects of
    American history on today’s society. I think discussion based classes helped me to understand what has been going on with our government today with the mess of the 2016 election, and has made me want to learn more about history. The way that history repeats itself has always intrigued me, those discussions helped me to go further into that thinking. Note-taking/reading was also one of the best ways for me to learn, as I am a visual learning. It is easier for me to retain more information if I write it down, which is why the PowerPoint notes helped me so much. The method I disliked least was more of a personal problem, I disliked watching videos. It wasn’t that they weren’t interesting or important, and I did really want to learn from them. But I often found myself too tired to pay attention to the videos in a dark classroom, a personal problem. The questions facts hashtags did help with the drowsiness a bit, but I didn’t retain much of the information.

    2) I wish we spent more time on the information on the early 1800s. I never felt like I was
    able to fully grasp the concepts of the information given and it was personally a harder section to learn for me. It also would have been nice in this era, to learn more about the economic downfalls if there were any and if it foreshadowed what happened in the future. There may not have been any economic importance but it’s something that I would have preferred to look into as well as how the morals of the country continued to change from the Revolution.

    3) I wish we would have studied less of World War I. In many ways I am able to recognize
    the importance of that time period, but I felt that I already knew the basics of the information and instead just needed the details. In our previous history classes, I always remember learning about World War I, so lots of the information seemed to be repeated. So just a shorter time on World War I may have been beneficial. I also wish the reconstruction section was shorter, to me personally, reconstruction was a concept that was easy to understand. Focusing less on the details and more on the effects may have been more helpful.

    4) One of my main weaknesses as a student was allowing myself to daze off during class.
    Not all the time, but some of the time, I would catch myself not paying attention in class because I was so tired. I was able to see the effects of that on my next test grade. Luckily, I was able to hold myself together most of the time. I also think one of my main weaknesses is not speaking up in class. Many times I was too nervous, afraid, or just didn’t care enough to speak up. But I regret this because I think that it would have helped me to remember and process the information more. One of my strengths is doing the simple work well and efficiently. I can’t tell you how many times a portrait or google doc grade has saved my grade from being on the brink of falling. By completing these small but simple assignments well, I was able to keep a constant grade with some bad test scores as well as process the information on my own.

    5) I have taken away that APUSH is a beast of its own. I learned many valuable lessons and
    the effects of American history. I remember as a freshman I was really looking forward to this class, because I knew it would be challenging but I would be learning something. I learned that I love to learn, but it takes a certain type of person and class to do so, so thank you. I truly learned that American history is confusing and sometimes a little ridiculous, but it is extremely important to learn from as we continue to grow as a nation. Sometimes the notes were tedious and I groaned with the DBQs but I value the moments that happened in this class. I am able to walk away and say that I have learned about something important.
34. Pietro Davi June 14, 2017 at 5:07 pm

    1. Before this class, I had never taken an AP course, so I wasn’t used to studying a lot and working for several hours for a singular class. I went from simply reading the textbook and doing worksheets to needing to watch videos, read extensive information, reflecting, and other methods for studying we did with our class. If I had to choose between any of these methods, I think I would pick the “PowerPoints”. Reading has never been a passion of mine, and watching videos is sometimes hard due to the narrator’s fast speaking pace. I think the pace in the presentations was perfect: we spent enough time on each slide, without wasting any. I’ve always found it easier to learn by listening, and then writing down the information you think is important. The PowerPoints gave me a sense of “freedom” to choose what I wanted to write down, and helped learn effectively through the year. Now going to my least favorite, taking notes on videos. I think that the fact of taking notes defeated the whole purpose of the movie. When I took notes on the films, I wasn’t paying attention to the message or facts, but rather focused on writing down the necessary information like a robot, to get the full credit of the notes. I’m not saying this method cannot work on other students, but I believe that it didn’t work for me, and therefore wouldn’t suite other similar students.
    2. I think this year we have covered very completely and effectively U.S. History. My biggest concerns were learning the information out of chronological order, and not focusing a lot on the Great Depression and FDR’s Presidency. I remember how hard it was to remember events in chronological order when I was studying for the AP test and the finals. I remembered the information, but couldn’t tell whether one vent came before the other. I think it would have made it easier for me to properly study and learn the information if I had learned it in chronological order. I think learning history in chronological order would help all the incoming students next year. I personally didn’t take the U.S. history class in 8th grade, since I was occupied taking French History. Therefore, this year was the first time in my life learning about the Great Depression. Unlike the other events we’ve learned, this one was the only one I wasn’t clear on. We had to learn about it very quickly since the “cinco de APUSH” was arriving quickly. I would have liked to go more in depth on the subject, and learn about the reactions to the reforms, the standards of living, and the overall feeling of living during the Great Depression. This was partially due to my lack of U.S. knowledge prior to the class, but also to a very tight schedule towards the arrival of the AP exam.
    3. As I have mentioned before, as we approached the AP exam, our schedule became tighter, since we still had a pretty big unit to cover. To avoid this last-minute stress and study, I think that we should have spent less time on the French and Indian War. If I remember correctly, we spent about a week learning about this event, with some extra days spent to watch films on the event. These films were probably the most interesting ones we saw throughout the year, but weren’t necessary for the understanding of this war, in my opinion. I would remove these films to spare two days of the year. Also, this war was maybe only mentioned once on the AP exam, and although it could appear next year, I don’t think this war is as important as the Greta Depression and FDR’s presidency, so I would give more time to these two instead of it. This is the only improvement I could see, since the planning was almost perfect.
    4. My most notable strengths as a student are listening and doing the work assigned by the teacher. I listened carefully to the presentations and videos we looked at in class. I listened to my pears expressing their opinions and feelings on diverse subjects, such as the reflection on the movie “Killing Us Softly 4”, and many others. This helped me progress and learn the curriculum, but also learn about the people in my classes. My second strength of completing the work done can be shown through the many portraits and the google docs. I have always completed my work, not only to get good grades, but also to cultivate myself and to show that I am a responsible and reliable student. My major weakness as a student was probably the lack of participation in class discussions on “uncomfortable” subjects, such as the one on the movie “Killing Us Softly 4”, and many others. I didn’t want to express myself, afraid that I would say something disliked or offensive toward students in the class. I also am foreign, so speaking English is still something I sometimes struggle with in “English speaking” public. These were my strengths and weaknesses as a student.
    5. In this class of AP U.S. History class I have learned the true definition of the “American Dream”: falling, but always wanting to get up and become better. This class taught me the origins of the now biggest power in the world, its qualities and flaws, showing me why America is one of the best countries in the world. There was nothing better than this detailed American History class to finish off my four years in the United States.
35. Rachel Stansberry June 14, 2017 at 5:32 pm

    1. I personally thought that the PowerPoints and google docs were the most effective. In class when doing the PowerPoints, I learned a lot. It was important to listen to what you were talking about, and you didn’t just brush the surface of the slide, but went into depth. By having the PowerPoint be more independent, it made me feel the need to be more focused on what was being talked about so I could write down notes and understand it more clearly. The lectures I surprisingly didn’t find that boring as it did keep me engaged on the events and in those YouTube videos. It was also nice because we could ask questions throughout it if we didn’t understand something. I liked the google docs as well because it made us look at the chapter before the lectures (or after), and let us focus onto a certain part of that period. It was also nice because we were provided other students information on their certain part. It was a nice way to study key points before exams.
    2. There are a few things that I wished we could’ve covered more. My first part would be the Korean and Vietnam war. On the AP exam there was a short answer question on the war in which I struggled because I didn’t remember as much on it feeling we didn’t go as in depth on it as we should’ve. That could also be because we learned that way earlier in the year, and it would’ve been better to study that period later or in chronological order. I did get confused a lot with when certain events happened because of that.
    3. Personally, I think we spent too much time on the Gilded Age. For me it seemed like most people got the point fairly quickly (as it isn’t too complex of a concept), but we kept going more and more in depth, way more than we needed to. I understand some of the time was to prepare us for our first practice DBQ, but I feel like the same information was just being repeated. I think we could’ve used that time for other periods and maybe even reviewing previous units for the upcoming AP exam.
    4. I personally think the google docs and blogs were some of my strengths. The google docs let me have more time to look at the term/person and I had several resources to get information from. It also wasn’t too time-consuming, and as long as I wrote good information, my grade was good. Another strength would be the blogs because it gave me room to include my own opinion on the matters, and as long as my opinion was reasonable and backed up, I’d be okay. Though homework was mostly a strength for me and kept my grade up, the portraits were a weakness. Yes I did do good on the portraits, but I just got lazy when doing it. I’d find myself getting bored when reading them and just skim (which doesn’t really work well and just takes longer to answer the questions). Another weakness for me was obviously the tests as they did lower my grade. Some of the tests I did do good on, but lots were a struggle. To be specific with the tests, the weakness in them was questions in which I had to read the passage and try to comprehend it. The other more straightforward questions were better however.
    5. APUSH has taught me a lot about history and how there is multiple views to each event (and some important views are often ignored). It has showed me how America has progressed from where it started (ex: civil rights), but is still a long way from being perfect, or well great. Because of this class, I can now understand America’s history a lot better and connect it to a lot of other things even when reading books.
    Thanks for being such a great teacher Mr. Wickersham! Have a good summer!
36. Gabe Abraam June 14, 2017 at 6:12 pm

    1. The most effective learning style for me in APUSH this year was reflecting and talking as a whole class. This was most effective for me because I got to hear everyone’s opinions on what we were learning and even voice my own, and listen to other people’s questions which I may not have thought about myself but could answer something I didn’t know I was even confused about in the first place. These discussions could range from during/after/over a controversial moment in the powerpoints we would talk about, or after a movie we had just watched, or after a book we had read for class. My least favorite way to learn was probably reading. It wasn’t necessarily bad but some of the reading was not my favorite. There were very little topics that I was interested in enough to read. This is because I just am not fond of reading for some reason and some of the topics weren’t very interesting to me and then having to read about them wasn’t bad but not the best for me personally. I’m sure others disagree with that and love reading but I just am not really a reader unless it’s something I’m totally into, which is what happened with Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand for our last reading assignment where we picked our own book.
    2. I think that a topic we could have covered more this year to me would be the units we covered at the very beginning of our APUSH journey as young sophomores. This is because at the time, we were not as prepared for the tests as we are now, and getting a little extra time to me would be a little better to help us become stronger as the year goes on. I know for me and many others the start of first trimester was the roughest for grades in APUSH because of our lack of experience. So to me personally, if we spent a little more time going over and learning the topics slower and then progressively moving faster as the year went on would have been better.
    3. I think something we should have studied a little less was the gilded age. This is because while we were learning it, to me at least, we had spent more time on it than I had needed. For example, I would have been capable of learning the gilded age at a little more of an accelerated pace than we had learned it this year. It was overall a good unit and by no means was it bad or spent an strenuous amount of time on. Although personally, I feel that we could have spent a little less time learning and covering material during the gilded age unit and still have succeeded just as well with covering it a little faster.
    4. One of my strengths as a student are listening and note taking. Whenever there was a powerpoint, for the most part, lecture, or film that we would watch, I would be a tentative listener and be aware of what we had been learning about. I was also good about taking good, detailed notes. For powerpoints and papers with excerpts on them, I would actually enjoy taking organized notes with lots of highlighting, bullets, and descriptions. With a combination of these I somewhat enjoyed movie notes, questions facts hashtags, powerpoints, and highlighting excerpts. With these strengths, I did also have some weaknesses as a student. One would be that I wasn’t too much into reading in my own time. I would do it but it was nowhere near as pleasurable as taking notes per say. An example would be a reading book that we are assigned, not one we could pick on our own and know what topic we would be interested in and be able to read tentatively. For me at least, I understand and read faster books that I like and can get into. Another one of my weaknesses as a student is studying. Personally, I am not the best test taker myself for not just this class but any class. I certainly have gotten better as I get older and this class especially helped with me progressing with that skill but I am still very far from mastering it and figuring out a definite studying strategy to use repetitively and frequently depending on test or subject type. APUSH though, has given me some awesome ideas to help study that actually work and help me evolve as a student.
    5. My APUSH experience was like a rollar coaster. At the beginning, going up that first mind boggling hill, in this case my first AP class and first test I did not get a good grade on, scared and surprised me. Although, after that first big hill, it only got smoother from there. I got to connect with both the students and Mr. Wickersham and I also feel much more knowledgeable with history. All in all, APUSH has made not just my school year feel more significant, but help me develope substantially as a student as well.
37. Caitlyn Moore June 14, 2017 at 6:34 pm

    1.My favorite learning style from the APUSH year was when we reflected and talked and had discussions. To me, when we discussed what we were learning as a class it allowed for me to connect it with my life. Discussions made the topic more relatable and easier to grasp that way no matter what era we were studying it didn’t seem so far away. I also enjoyed watching videos because they always gave an in depth understanding of the topic since they went into detail, making the information stick more. Although I understand that taking notes is necessary and we can’t always discuss or do a classroom activity, taking notes and the powerpoints didn’t work well for me. They were boring at times and made it difficult to focus even if I liked what we were learning. With the long packets of slides and just the teacher talking it made it easy to tune out.

    2.Throughout everything that we’ve learned this year in APUSH, I wish we’ve would’ve spent more time on the Vietnam War. Although we spent a large amount of time on how it affected the country and the protests that followed it, I wish we would’ve discussed what caused it and how it’s affected the veterans of the war. I constantly hear of the Vietnam War veterans and how terrible it was for them and I want to know what happened in Vietnam and how we’re helping them today.

    3.This year, I wished we hadn’t gone as in depth as we did with the Revolutionary War. I understand that that’s probably one of, if not the most important portion of American History, however we’ve learned about it before and it seemed as if we were learning about it for weeks. It may be because I’ve already learned about it previous to APUSH throughout elementary and middle school, but I was exhausted of it by the time we were done.

    4.My strengths as a student were the projects or the evaluations and writings that we had to do. I’m strong at analyzing documents or learning about something and then stating my opinion about it or discussing it. I was weak at my studying habits. Even if I knew a topic very well or we had been learning about it for a long time I still didn’t seem to do well and it’s simply because I didn’t know how to study. I was weak at taking notes and then applying that to studying at home and watching videos or making flashcards. I feel that APUSH made my studying skills better but I still have some growing to do.

    5. What I truly learned about American History is that we are complicated and there’s never one true perspective to something. A victory to one group of Americans is a tragedy to another. When I began APUSH I had such a one minded view on things. I knew that my family supported Democrats in every election, and that my parents hated when politicians lowered taxes on the rich. Now, I’m more understanding to what’s necessary for America and I can understand much of what Republicans support regardless of my background.
38. Ian Birley June 14, 2017 at 7:28 pm

    1. I’ll start with my least favorite way of learning because it transitions better into my favorite. My least favorite means of learning would be the questions, facts, and hashtags alongside videos shown in class. This may work for some people in retention of information, but for myself, it doesn’t. I have the ability to fill up the sheet with facts stated in the video, but I never find myself asking questions because I haven’t a clue whether the video will answer them or not. I dislike the hashtags as well. I don’t use that sort of social media and I don’t find it especially helpful in retention of information. I would rather just write down information from the video, then have an in depth discussion on the video itself. I was most engaged in learning when the lights were on, and you were writing info on the board as part of an all-encompassing discussion (the example that comes to mind is the World War I lesson).

    2. I wish we had spent more time on the World Wars. We talked mainly about the period leading up to American involvement in them, but seldom about what that American involvement entailed and how it interacted with the Europeans’ own motives and ambitions. I understand it isn’t a large part of the curriculum, but for a country that has spent the majority of its life at war, we talk very little about the wars themselves. We learned next to nothing about General Paton and his badassery. We spent a great deal of time talking about the people at home, rather than the immense courage in the actions taken by the men who fought to preserve Democracy (or our own interests in the case of WWI).

    3. This is a hard decision to make. Even though, comparatively, the U.S. is a young country, there is still so much to cover, and it is hard to pinpoint a single theme or goal of the U.S. because the individuals who hold the power change every few years. That said, I think we talked too much about the Polk era. Perhaps it was just personal lack of interest, but it felt that unit went on for far too long.

    4. My strength in this class was my interest for learning about important figureheads of American history. I especially enjoyed learning about the large corporations of the industrial revolution such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan. I also liked learning about the frontier and Theodore Roosevelt, the man who broke the trusts of the aforementioned people. My weakness certainly lied in a progressive lack of work ethic over the course of the year. There are lessons I have learned from this alone, and I plan to use them to better myself next year.

    5. The reason why America does anything, is named and nameless individuals alike, from backgrounds of all kinds.
39. Aaron Stottlemyer June 14, 2017 at 7:45 pm

    1) My favorite way to learn was the student led open discussions;for example, whenever we had Socratic Seminars, or even google docs, I would find myself becoming very invested, and doing the assignments not for the grade (ok partially for the grade), but because they were fun to do. I ended up pushing myself to learn more information than was needed, even if it would never come to use later on (cough cough 2000 word essay on Texas cough cough). Although I didn’t mind the power points you assigned, I just found those days to be standard classes, and not exactly what I had in mind with an AP class. Nevertheless, they got their point across, and I definitely learned some very valuable information from them. My least favorite method was the movies and notes; I felt as if I was too focused on the movies to take notes, and then I was too focused on taking notes to pay attention to the movie, then I miss a big plot point, etc etc.

    2) I wish we had focused on more ‘what if’ scenarios; like what would have happened if X didn’t do Y, or if X negotiation had failed. I really feel as if it would have added a lot more depth to the subject material, and could allow us to focus on what actually happened. One example might be the war of 1812: what might have happened if the US hadn’t won the battle of New Orleans, thus proving our might to the world? Would we have just led to another war if we did take land from Canada? I also feel like this would just make the class more interesting, and enjoyable overall.

    3) Although I do admit that it is very important to learn modern history, I do think that it would be necessary to withhold subjects on the past 20-30 years until much later (such as after the AP test). Relating subjects to modern day material with syntheses was always fun, but I definitely felt as if you should wait until after the AP test to teach full lessons on it.

    4) I felt as if I wasn’t fully dedicated to some of the assignments given to us, especially the portraits. I felt as if they left nothing open for discussion, it was just read x and answer y, nothing more and nothing less. Many other assignments like the google docs let me look up my own information, and find what I thought was interesting, and not have some book tell me what to find interesting instead. I feel like I’ve already covered my strength earlier; whenever there is an assignment where I can come up with my own material that I find interesting, I get carried away and do it as a fun activity instead of just homework.

    5)APUSH taught me many things in about both American and Global history. It taught me how events can unfold, how the butterfly affect can spread across countries, how complex negotiations were, and it taught me what it really is to be an American. I felt like before taking APUSH, I had a general idea of how America became what it is today, but afterwards I can now confidently say that I know (almost) exactly how America gained it’s foothold in the world, and how it truly became one badass nation.
40. Clare Walton June 14, 2017 at 8:20 pm

    1. I think my favorite style that we did would be talking about the different things that we go over. It’s effective for me because it allows me further understand the topic we are going over because it comes from another person. This gives perspective on the different topics and if i didn’t understand it from how it was originally taught it gives me another chance to hear about it in a different way. I think my least favorite is reading about the different topics. I mean it helps in some cases like in books, but in others its easy to zone out and miss something.

    2. I wish we spent more time on the culture in the different time periods. Like for most of the periods we just went over the big historical events that happen. I understand that those are more important when it comes to the AP test but it would be nice to learn about how people lived and acted and what they did during their free time and such.

    3. Honestly i think there wasn’t anything that we went too in depth about. Everything that we did was in good moderation. The things that we did go into more depth like the different routes that armies took during the different wars isn’t as important. I think this because its not really relevant information unless it had to do with a major battle.

    4. I think my strengths were in the pieces of homework that we had, like the portraits and the blogs. I enjoyed reading the portraits and thinking about the answers to some of the blogs that made you think. My weaknesses were definitely the tests. I’ve never been a good test taker but these tests seemed to stump me more than others.

    5. My take away from apush is probably that no matter where you start in life anything can happen. Over the year we studied a lot of people who didn’t start with a small loan of a million dollars to start their career. These people in history proved that if you work had and dedicate yourself to the work you decide on, anything can happen.
41. Jay Stansberry June 14, 2017 at 10:33 pm

    1. The learning style that was most effective for me were the PowerPoints. These worked for me because they gave a quick description of all the important events. Also, I am able to remember things better when they are said, so the descriptions provided in the PowerPoints were easy for me to remember. The learning style that worked the least for me was reading the text book. It worked if I wanted more specific information, but it was long and boring to read. The book also had more information than I needed and was a struggle at times to find the information that I was looking for. I found that the Powerpoints and notes in class covered everything well enough for me to understand. The Google Docs were also helpful when I needed specific information on a subject we may not have covered in the notes.
    2. I wish that we had spent more time studying the period of WWI and the Great Depression. I wish we has looked into the first World War more. I think we just covered the reasons that we joined the war briefly and the Treaty of Versailles. It would have been interesting to learn more about the causes and the turning points in the war. It would have also been interesting to cover the causes and the begging of the Great Depression more. We didn’t discuss much about the Presidents between Wilson and FDR. If we had studied this more, I could get a better understanding of the full range of causes of the Great Depression, like what we did when studying the Great Recession of 2008.
    3. I think we spent a good amount of time on each of the units. Everything that we studied was important for the test. The unit I think that we should have spent less time on was the first unit on the discovery of America. It was important to know, but I feel that this time was not important to learn about because this was well before America was formed and didn’t affect the future of America much. The things like the Columbian exchange, or the Spanish in Mexico didn’t seem necessary to learn about when studying US history as these seem more like world history. We needed to know this for the AP test, but we could have shortened it and still got enough knowledge.
    4. My greatest strength were the tests. I felt that I was able to remember the information and get good grades on all the tests. Even though I didn’t study at all, I was able to collect all the information from class and on the Google docs and was able to effectively use it to get good grades on the tests. I think that my greatest weakness was understanding some of the primary sources. I felt that on some of them, especially some of the cartoons, I didn’t really understand what it was talking about. I did get better as the year went on and understood them better.
    5. My main takeaway from APUSH is that there isn’t one correct way to view history. As we studied and looked at the different schools of thought, I saw that there isn’t one correct set of history, but many different interpretations. Even though I may see an event in one way, it doesn’t mean that is the only way to see it. I can take away from this that America has been great, and has been bad, sometimes at the same time and that history is not as simple as it might seem.
42. Lindsey Nedd June 14, 2017 at 10:54 pm

    1. During this past school year I have really enjoyed watching videos and taking notes, along with power points. Whenever we watch videos and you give us a paper with questions to fill out I find that it’s much easier to remember information than any other learning method in this class. The videos almost always pull my attention so it’s really easy for me to stay focused and take notes, it’s also a break from sitting and having to listen to someone talk for a long time (sort of the same thing I guess but I prefer the videos). I like going over the powerpoints, I have an interest in U.S. history so I enjoy learning new things about the United States and the people who have made a difference in it, however, the information that I did learn for power points wasn’t nearly as easy to memorize because some powerpoint were just too long. But during final exam time I reference the powerpoints the most because they usually cover the majority of information included on the final. One learning style I really didn’t like was having to look in the textbook with a group and fill out the information then present to the class. I was never sure if I had enough or if my summary was just completely off, that’s why I would typically come up to you and ask if my summary of the topic I was suppose to cover was sufficient. Especially during first trimester this class was really intimidating for me so I would always stress out about working in groups then sharing in front of the class, I’m also an extremely slow reader and having a time limit put a decent amount of stress on me throughout the year when we had to read things in class. Sometimes it’s hard to remember a lot of informations when it’s just someone talking for a long period of time, I think groups sharing about their topic is worse, I usually don’t remember much from their presentations because I’m so worried about mine.
    2. Personally I wish that we would’ve spent more time on the Cuban Missile Crisis, just because I have a huge obsession with JFK. I also wish we would’ve talked more about what he did during his presidency before he was assassinated. I really enjoy learning about World War l and World ll ( my all time favorite subject to cover in apush ever). I really wish we could’ve covered more of those two wars in class, because I really think it shaped who we are as a whole in terms of how other countries view us. I also really would’ve like to learn more about foreign policy itself, considering I didn’t know what it was when I came into this class and we discussed it a lot I think it should have been covered more in depth. I think that we should’ve also covered all of the presidents that have been assassinated or presidents that have had an attempt made on their life, because before I read Assassination Vacation I really had no idea.
    3. I didn’t enjoy learning about slaves in apush, consider almost every year slavery is covered in class, sometimes two. At the time we were learning about slavery in second trimester we were also learning about them in honors english, and personally for me it was just too much, I don’t like learning about it every year it’s too much for me. The cotton picking was going too far in my opinion I really did not like that at all it made me feel extremely uncomfortable, not to mention second trimester I was the only black kid in my apush class which kind of made it worse. I also didn’t like learning about 9/11, I understand that we have to but that was somewhat traumatic for me to see the towers burning and people screaming and sobbing in the street, I thought the video was too much.
    4. I think I have a strength when it comes to political debates I love them it’s so much fun for me, I’m never scared to talk or speak up when we are having the agree, disagree, or undecided talks ( I wish we had more of those), even if we are just having a discussion and i turns into a debate which happened pretty often considering the 2016 presidential election and inauguration of the cheese puff were happening throughout the year. I personally think that I’m good at getting my point across, and I’m even better at it when I have time to prepare, because there are some kids in apush that just memorize the whole entire textbook and it can get hardt to compete with that sometimes. Another strength that I have is turning my assignments in on time this really helped me throughout the year considering I’m not the best test taker. I think my largest weakness in apush is taking test and preparing for them (not including finals). At first the wording of the test kind of confused me, but as time went on that got better. I really did not like the fact that some information turned up on the test that we didn’t cover in class, that really threw me off throughout the year.
    5. The most important thing I learned about American history this year was that America can be mean, dirty, corrupt, and just plain out terrible. Before I took this class I truly believe America was the best place to be (which I still do), where the United States government always follows the Constitution, sadly I learned that this was not true.
43. Camille West June 14, 2017 at 11:09 pm

    1. I like writing responses to reading best, like Google Docs, and I hate to say it, portraits, but it’s how I learn best. Getting information together and writing it out in my own words helps me learn it better and I am more likely to remember the things that I write about. I am also more articulate when I write, and although I do really like class discussions, it’s better for me to express my thoughts and ideas on paper because usually I have thought about it a bit more and it’s not on the spot. Despite that, I also really like class discussions because rather than reading someone else’s blog or whatever, I have to hear their thoughts and actually consider them if I want to contribute to the discussion, which I usually do. My least favorite would be just straight up reading the textbook or someone
    else’s Google Doc, because without a purpose to it, like answering a question, they’re usually just so boring and I get tired reading them. I often go to bed right after reading because they tire me and I will give up and say that I’ll do it tomorrow.
    2. I wish that we had spent more time on arts and culture, of any time period really, because that it what interests me most. Although we did look at a lot of political cartoons, I’m not very good at finding symbolism or reading into things like that, so it didn’t really interest me unless it was actually just funny. I know that politics is really what drives most of history, but sometimes it gets boring and I would like to learn more about other things, like sciences and such, which I know that we did sometimes go over but more of that and culture stuff would be cool.
    3. When we went over the industrial revolution, it seemed to go on forever for me, especially the late 19th century, but maybe that’s because it was leading up to the AP test. The westward expansion also felt like it took a really long time, but I suppose that’s because it did. I preferred learning more about the Revolution and before that.
    4. I think that my strength as a student is participating in class discussion and paying attention because I’m actually very interested in history, so that makes the class better, compared to the people who don’t enjoy history at all, who might find it a lot harder to work on apush stuff. My weakness as a student it probably laziness, because I am very lazy and really hate doing homework, even though it is usually beneficial. Despite that, I often did the blogs or portraits during my first hour or lunch because I just didn’t want to do them and would put them off. Also a lot of times I’m just really tired and not with the program and don’t really know what’s going on. Something that is a strength and a weakness about me is that usually I learn things pretty well the first time and I’ll be able to remember them so I’ll just rely on that, which is good but also a weakness because I don’t really know how to study, and I also don’t know what I don’t know, so I won’t take the time to review and look at the stuff that I have forgotten.
    5. Although this class was focused on American history, for me that wasn’t the most important take away. Most importantly, I learned how to be able to organize my time and think about thinks in different ways. Another hugely beneficial thing is learning how to write paragraphs about not just information, but also my thoughts and opinions and expanding on them, which we had to a lot. Another good thing about the class is being able to look at what people are trying to today, mostly in politics, and be able to compare it to similar things that have happened in the past, because it often seems to be true that there is nothing new under the sun, and having a vast knowledge of history is useful for referencing in the modern day. It also exposes the people who study it to a lot of different kinds of people, so it sort of teaches us about people in that way.
44. Markus Butkovich June 14, 2017 at 11:15 pm

    1. This year, there were a lot of different methods that were used in APUSH. We watched different videos, wrote different papers in class, and did different projects for the class. I’d have to say that the projects that we did in class were my favorite, because they let us go off the books to find information that we didn’t know about a specific topic that we wanted to learn about. The projects could also let us collaborate with other people in the class, and even in the case of the presidential bracket, debate and go against each other. This also goes hand in hand with another way that we learned, which was open class discussions. We did lots of these, whether it was a socratic seminar about a book or document that we had to read, or whether it was an agree, disagree, or undecided discussion, where almost everyone could truly express their opinions, and it would become a debate. Portraits were the ones I learned the least from. They were the least helpful, where I didn’t read them but answer the questions, but there were only around two questions on the test about it.
    2. One thing that I wish we spent more time on was the sixties. We didn’t really talk about the hippie movement that sparked and was mostly based around California, and didn’t really talk about the Vietnam War all that much. With the hippie movement, it was a big part of culture and change in the sixties. And there were many things that sparked from this. I know APUSH isn’t about music history, but Woodstock was a major event in history that wasn’t even mentioned, and artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, and other bands that went alongside the hippie movement. Along with this, even though he was in office starting in 1969, he started the war on drugs, which also went with the hippie movement. The Vietnam War was lightly touched on as well. I wish that there would have been a Vietnam film that we would have watched. There are so many ones that depict how bad Vietnam actually was. One that would have been good to watch is Full Metal Jacket, which is a brutal but realistic portrayal about the horrors of war, especially the Vietnam war.
    3. I can’t really think of any subject that we went to deep into, but I know that there were some. If I had to pick one, it would be the O.J. trials. I realize that O.J. Simpson’s charges were an important part of history, but I think we over did it. The show was good, but I don’t think that it was necessary. Plus, there were other things that were going on at the time which were the reason that the trials were so important in the first place. I think that the O.J. trials overshadowed the importance and extremism of the race situation in Los Angeles. I’m not saying that it wasn’t important, but it didn’t give a big enough perspective of everything happening around it.
    4. My strengths as a student was that I know lots about film. I know this doesn’t exactly help my grade in the class, but it helped me pay attention during the powerpoints in class. For each era, some movies from that decade, or sometimes the best picture winners, would be posted on the last slide. This got me excited because we were going to talk about some movies that were most likely iconic. I would also participate and listen during the normal part of the lecture because of this. I had many weaknesses in the class, but my personal one was the tests. They were too long, and the questions would trip me up because I would rethink them a lot. There was also lots of material that wasn’t entirely covered on the power points, and were focused on the details in the lesson information. The documents on the tests were also hard to understand. Most of them were luckily covered in class, but they could still be confusing on a test.
    5. My one or two sentences- APUSH taught me about the vastness of history, and how much information is actually out there. It changed my perspective on history, and that everybody has a story.
    Thanks for teaching us this year Mr. Wickersham.
45. Joshua Salter June 15, 2017 at 1:31 am

    Joshua Salter
    06/15/2017
    3rd
    Wickersham
    Blog #100
    I feel that talking about Apush was the most effective way to learn in my opinion, I feel this way because you’re voicing your opinion to other people in the classroom, and what you say effects the other people in the room, and how they view the history that you’re discussing. So I feel that agree, disagree, and undecided is effective because your voice on your history persuades other people that are trying to decide on the topic. So I feel this is most effective because it keeps you involved, on your heels, and ready to speak on the topic, also if you don’t know the topic, it’ll make you look bad in front so it kind of sways you to learn the content to discuss on it. I feel like writing or reading was my least favorite because it doesn’t keep you engaged, it bores you quickly unlike talking and expressing your opinions on history to other children.
    I wish we would’ve spent more time on the World Wars because those were the most interesting wars to me. I liked learning about the World Wars because it expanded the map from just America as it is in the name of the class (Apush). The world wars bring up multiple other countries and their involvement in the wars, and makes it more interesting for me because for a couple of weeks you aren’t learning about just America, you’re expanding the map and learning more about other countries.
    I wish we could’ve spent less time on the first topic we talked about, The Mayans and Aztecs, in my opinion I find that stuff boring because of how long ago that was, there isn’t that much detail on the topics either because of the lack of technology there was back then. So learning about these time periods from long ago are boring for me because of the little information there is on these topics.
    My strengths were mostly in comprehending the wars and why people did the things they did and what they fought for. A war that I have a great knowledge and comprehension for is the Cold War. Another war that I comprehended pretty well was World War 2, some of the information given off in the book The Imperial Cruise helped me understand the war better. So a strength of mine is comprehending the wars with a deeper knowledge. My weaknesses were studying things before the year of 1776, I never got a good handle on the content that was learned during that unit, because there isn’t that much on the topics other than a couple of resources from that time period. Like for example the Mayans and Aztecs, there wasn’t that much content on them, other than the normal things such as where they came from and what they did.
    What I learned from this year of Apush is that if you put your mind to it and give an effort, than it’ll payoff for you in the long run, what you put in is what you get out of this class.
46. Jason Schumacher June 15, 2017 at 6:13 am

    1. My favorite learning style in this class this year was every hands-on project, I say this because I felt like I was having fun in a class where you mostly take notes. While this was my favorite way of learning in this class, the notes were the most helpful, and everything that we did separately I have seemed to learn less of. I have noticed that I seem to be bored while taking a ton of notes that eventually help me more but I will be bored out of my mind for the whole time eventually killing my brain metaphorically. My least favorite way of learning in this class was not trying to debate between people who did not know what they were talking about (because seeing them ramble on about what they wanted vs what was correct was funny) and not taking a huge number of notes in one day, instead I had no least favorite way of learning in that class, most of the ways we did try to learn that I did not like ranked a tie for 3rd place. And most of these ways of learning were not bad ways, just not as fun as the other ways.
    2. I wish we spent more time on everything that I did not remember as well (everything not in class), because some of this was not on the test and most of it was, so when I did not study some things to study others, I usually made the wrong decision with studying and that could have been figured out with the help of doing some at least a little bit more in class. When I say this I really mean some of the portrait book work and coinciding with that unofficially assign pages for the review book b/c the due date/ stuff duelist on the white board along with that would have helped me personally
    3. I wish we studied less of the supposed to be relaxing tough guise, and the killing us softly movies. I was truly wondering why you wanted to show us this in the first place, but when I saw simple connections to some history, it was just not enough for me to say this should be one of the things we studied, and I also thought that the movies were more of a distraction of what we could have done In place with it, also it was more of a movie that someone (for the tough guise movie) on the far left would only show, or buy (saying this in an Independent view).
    4. For one, I am a very thoughtful person and give out respect as it fits, even if it may not seem to be this way. One thing I have heard before is that a middle child in a family has the skill to think with all viewpoints, I have also seen this in my own way of thinking. I say this because I know where a specific person is coming from in a general stance, also why they would be thinking in the way they would be. Even though I am a conservative Republican and have my own viewpoints, I take a person’s thoughts in hand no matter who they are, or what they stand for because if I shot them down, or did not pay attention to their argument I would most certainly loose in even the smallest debate, or prove them to be correct on the smallest of scale. I am not shy or timid, but do not speak my mind. I feel I’m more like Abraham Lincoln, but one that is more open to the public. For Lincoln loved to listen because he could gather more information that way, and I see that as so. This, however, restricts me from talking as much, or much at all and I would rather introject into a conversation if I really have something of real value to add in.
    5. there is no correct answers to an un-masterfully carved out “life or death” situation and sometimes you even must go about it as it comes because you could even think more clearly about the present situation then and with your human instincts kicking in, even make the best choice for the people you represent. But this does not always work, you could send you, your friends, and even your country into a spiral of doom if you make the worst choice for your country. In other words, be careful with your decisions for you don’t know what is going to happen in the future.
    or I could say life is like a box of chocolates…
47. paige macdonald June 15, 2017 at 8:27 am

    1.
    For me personally, the power points worked the best. I liked going through slowly and explaining each event with detail, in your own words. You have a good way of explaining things and that is why I didn’t like reading those excerpts of the chapters. The power points allowed me to slow down and ask questions and really absorb the topic. This also allowed me to have information that I couldn’t find online. Having it explained to you is much better than having to read all the content by yourself. PowerPoint’s also allowed me to look back when I was studying for a test on that subject. Definitely, the guided notes that you sometimes gave us didn’t do the trick. Yes, we would highlight and read through them, but I felt like we were always going to fast, and if I wanted guided notes I would just look online instead.
    2.
    I wish we spent more time on culture. I find the culture of this time super interesting and I think it helped me understand more of the era. When I think about the colonial times, not much comes up because all I have in my brain is political problems. I would like to learn more about the time period’s way of living, daily norms, and ways of thinking. I think that would broaden my idea of the time period or subject that we were learning.
    3.
    I think we should have studied less of the 70’s and 80’s. For some reason, I remember spending so much time on those two decades. We spent a lot on Communism and the Cold War, as well as the Vietnam War and the Korean War. Yes, these were very influential on our foreign policy, but I wish we focused on domestic affairs too. There were many terms and definitions from these two decades that I do not remember now because there were so many!
    4.
    I think one of my strengths as a student is understanding when I know the information. There are times in class where I feel like everyone knows what we’re talking about and I am just clueless. This lets me know that I need to ask more questions in class, which allows me to understand the topic better. I think comprehending the information is a big part of this class, and I did that well. One of my biggest weaknesses as a student is not studying far enough ahead of time. I always tell myself to study for tests ahead of time, but somehow I end up studying the night before. I need to work on my procrastination and how to study better.
    5.
    I think what APUSH has taught me the most is that history is all tied together. Our history is not single events, but a whole timeline of human discoveries and hardships, as well as wars and territorial conquering. I am proud of our country, and it has been through a lot. I hope future APUSH students know that history is important and it can repeat itself.
48. Nico Jones June 15, 2017 at 12:39 pm

    1. My favorite learning style this year was watching youtube videos by JoczProduction and Adam Norris and reviewing your ppt notes in class. I would take notes on all of the points they covered in the video and combine those notes the class took. By getting my notes from two different sources I was able to get a better understanding of the topic and I was able to remember facts better. I have amazing short term memory and awful long term memory so cramming the night before the test and even the AP exam worked amazingly for me and these videos definitely helped me get the best grade I could on the quizzes, tests, dbqs, and other assignments. My least favorite learning style was the actual talking about American history because I felt like I did not retain as much information from our discussions as I did from actually writing the information down.

    2. I wish we would have spent more time studying current events or Obama’s administration, because i have absolutely no idea what he did in office because I was too young when he was in office to actual understand his policies or agenda. I think if we would have spent more time studying current events, then our class would have been able to come to their own conclusions of how to feel about politics from 2000 to now without everyone just carrying along their parent’s or older relative’s biases and opinions.

    3. I wish we would have studied less of the 1770s and the American revolution because I feel like we spent two trimesters studying the same events over and over again. Many of us already know a lot about the events leading up to the Revolution like the Boston Tea Party, Boston Massacre, etc from middle and elementary school. Therefore I didn’t think that we needed to spend as much time as we did on it.

    4. Through this year I realized a lot of my strengths as a student such as cramming for the test the night before is the best way for me to retain information and completing assignments full heartedly. Time management is also one of my strengths as a student because I don’t think I turn one assignment in late this year. My weakness in this class were definitely the portraits because for me they were all just awful and they took me so long to read and answer the questions. I could spend the whole day trying to finish the portrait and only end up answering 3 questions.

    5.I learned that American history is very deceptive, most of the information we learn in textbooks were carefully compiled. There are hundreds and thousands of women and minorities that did amazing things in American history, yet we never learn in depth or long about them, but we hear the same stories about what white men have done over and over again on the backs of those very people.
49. Emily Brown June 15, 2017 at 1:15 pm

    1. My favorite learning style was the note taking we did with the power-points. I learn a lot better from notes and seeing them written down. It helps me prepare better for tests and all the information is in one place. I also enjoyed doing the power-points because hearing the information and writing it down is a great way for me to remember the information. Our class discussions were times where everyone could ask questions and I really benefited from hearing the questions and the answers. I did not really learn much from reading the already made note sheets. The highlighting did not help me much and most of the time I would also write my own notes next to the printed ones to make everything clear and easy to remember the way I’d write it. I didn’t really like questions, facts, hashtags videos. I liked learning the notes straightforward from the powerpoints.

    2. I really wished we spent more time on the 1930’s and Great Depression. I feel as though we really rushed through that part of U.S. history and I was nervous to have a DBQ or LEQ on the AP test about that time in history. We only spent like 4 days on the whole unit in total and I wish we had more time to talk more in depth about FDR, the New Deal, etc. I also wish that we went in chronological order! I got a bit confused on some of the small parts of history and some of it jumbled together since we didn’t go in order. I also think that we needed a little bit more time on the Korean War. It was one of my least known topics of the year.

    3. I don’t think we spent too much time on any of the subject topics. Overall, I can’t remember times when I’d think we’d spent too much time on things. Yes maybe we watched some movies for a few says too long, but overall I think our speed was good except we went very fast through the 1930’s. This whole year I enjoyed learning about all the topics.

    4. I believe that my biggest strengths as an APUSH student were being determined and organized. I felt that I was always determined to work hard, keep my grade up, and do better on the next test than I did on the last one. I was organized with doing all my assignments on time and to the best of my ability. I also think I did very well on the DBQs. My first DBQ grade was something I’m really proud of and the way we learned how to do them made me organized and a strong DBQ writer. My weaknesses were my LEQs. I did not do the best on them and I think that they were my low point of the year. I wasn’t super happy with how I did on them. I don’t remember my grade exactly on the constitution one, but I know it was lower.

    5. My takeaways from APUSH were becoming a (faster) better writer and overall, I learned so much about America. I really feel that APUSH expanded my horizons on the past and opened my eyes to the future. APUSH has made me a better student and I am really glad I took this class.
50. Gus June 15, 2017 at 5:00 pm

    1. In apush I enjoyed how we learned in different formats greatly but I did have a favorite. I liked the discussions the best when learning something new since we get right down to the point and take notes, if we have questions we can get a further explanation. Simple. My least favorite was splitting up in groups and read a section. I would much rather read as a class but I understand that groups maybe faster.
    2. For the most part we got through most of the topics regarding US history but their is something I wish we spent more time on. I wish we had spent more time doing the current event stuff within the 2000s era. I wish we had covered more of this era since we lacked it in our normal schedule and I also in general discussing currents events and cool to go into events that we were alive to experience. This was covered economically as we watched a lot about the 2008 economic crisis but that happened 9 years ago so even more current than that.
    3. For the most part I felt everything was balanced pretty evenly but I thought that the founding fathers era seemed to go for a very long time. Though it founded what we are today I felt we spent the greatest portion on this era.
    4. As a student I was successful and unsuccessful throughout the year, I got As and Cs. My weakest point in apush was my laziness when it came to the mass amounts of homework due and I turned some in late and not it all at times. The best moment in apush was receiving an A on a test after study for a mass amount of time. A lot of the year I got Bs which is ok but the Cs represent the little effort I was willing to put in studying.
    5. In apush I learned good study habits and about history events and their effectiveness to create the America we know today. I learned names of people, dates, and more detail than any other history class that I have every taken. In this class I also learned how to analyze pictures and cartoons as well as read documents and be able to get the purpose and connect it to past events we learned about. I felt that this class made me develop more of an opinion on society as well as follow current events more frequently. Due to this class I have started to read more and become more organized and I will miss it greatly in my last years as a high school student.