June 1

Blog #157 – Final Reflection on a Year in APUSH

This blog is part of your final exam, so please take some time and think about your answers.

400 words minimum for your total response of all of the questions.  Please number your answers in the comment section.

1. A lot of our time this year has been spent reading, writing, studying, watching videos, reflecting, and talking about American history.  Discuss what your favorite learning style was this year and why it was effective for you.  Also, explain which was your least favorite way to learn and explain why it doesn’t work for you.

2. We studied a lot of stuff this year – from the Pilgrims to the Revolution to Andrew Jackson (soon to be leaving the $20, or not) to Abe Lincoln to Alice Paul to the Depression and the Civil Rights Movement.  What did you wish we had spent more time on than we did this year and why?

3. Yep, we studied a whole lot of stuff this year, but I bet you wish there were some units that were shorter or didn’t go as in depth.  What did you wish we had studied less of and explain why (keep in mind that if the info didn’t make it onto the test doesn’t mean it won’t be there next year)?

4. Choose Your Own Adventure was a brand new wrinkle that I had introduced this year and never done something like this before.  What do you think were some of the strengths and weaknesses of this project?  Explain why.

5. People talk a lot about takeaways – a summary of an experience, distilled down to one or two sentences.  What is your takeaway from APUSH (or in other words, what did you truly learn about American history)?

Due by 11:59 p.m. on the night of your final exam.  


Posted June 1, 2023 by geoffwickersham in category Blogs

61 thoughts on “Blog #157 – Final Reflection on a Year in APUSH

  1. Jenna

    1. My favorite way of studying and making sure the information stuck in my brain was by using Himmler’s history review videos. I would watch his videos and take notes to study for tests. When I used this method I tested better than when I used other methods. I think it worked so well for me because his videos went in order of events in history so it was more like a story and I understood that better than just being given straight facts. I wish I had gotten his ultimate review packet earlier because I used that to study for the AP test and I feel like it was effective. One method of studying that did not work for me was reading the review book. I tried this several times. I would read the chapters in advance and then before the test but it just didn’t seem to click doing it that way. It was probably because there were so many facts that I felt like I had to memorize them all but that didn’t really help.

    2. I would have liked to have spent more time looking into the women’s movement and civil rights movement. I just found it interesting that there was such a change in the 1900s with the 19th Amendment, martin luther king jr, and the flapper era. I would have liked to explore how their events shaped how things are today because they were obviously so influential.

    3. I felt like we spent a lot of time in the first 3 chapters or units with christopher columbus and the first settlement. I mean that was our summer homework and then we had that like the 3-day long project to research different colonies like the Chesapeake and New England. I found this indebtedness was helpful but because we spent so much time on it it seemed like it made the rest of the year rushed because we never when that in-depth about any other topic.

    4. I thought this project was unique because it allowed a lot of room to explore topics that we hadn’t yet covered that you were interested in and not do with the whole class. However, I was expecting to be able to research ANYTHINg that pertained to U.S. history in the years you gave us and that was not the case because I was confined to what was in the Google classroom. I was hoping to look at the fashion trends throughout the decades but sadly didn’t get a chance to do that. Also, I felt like the way it was introduced was weird because it sounded like you only had to do five but if you wanted an A you had to do extra work. I feel like a better way to put it would have been to say you do 15 to get an A but if you don’t wish to do that many then the least you can do to still get a passing grade is 5 (if that makes sense). But overall the idea of the project was very cool.

    5. American history can be summed up as Americans taking land from others, war, independence, more land, fighting with ourselves, some more wars, occasional peace, and many problems that still need to be fixed. But actually, I learned a lot through this class which helped me better understand our country and how it was founded, the good and the bad.

  2. Juno Saulson

    1. I prefer regular notetaking (online or on paper). For some reason rewriting what someone says makes the information stick in my brain more effectively. I just didn’t like how many handouts we got during the course of the year. I know that all of them were important to some degree, I just lost a good chunk of them because of how many there were. I wasn’t a huge fan of all of the writing assignments though: not the DBQ/LEQ/SAQ practices, but the portraits and other assignments of the like. They didn’t really help me understand the nuances of those eras any more than taking regular notes did. It mainly just felt like I was answering questions for the sake of answering them, not because it was important for my learning to understand such concepts.

    2. More recent events! Aside from the Sunday review session a week (or two) before the AP test, there weren’t too many in depth discussions/lessons surrounding Period 9 (post 1970s, right?). I didn’t really understand the majority of events that happened from the 1980s onward. That could be on me for not doing enough outside research, but it is what it is. Another thing we should’ve probably spent more time on is the regional differences in the 13 colonies as well as the indigenous peoples of pre-colonial America(s). For the SAQ and LEQ choices there were mentions of “regional differences” between the colonies in terms of agriculture, religion, etc, and we just didn’t talk about that too much. Might be helpful for the future APUSH students?

    3. I know it was important, but I think we could’ve spent less time talking about the New South/post Civil War Southern culture. I don’t remember how much time we spent on that era as a whole, but it felt like we had spent a solid week talking about the New South after we didn’t spend too much time talking about the Civil War. My memory of this could be totally wrong, but I don’t think we needed to spend as much time on the New South as we did.

    4. I personally liked the structure of the project: giving us the opportunities to do research/ assignments in some of the areas we didn’t get to study or go into in depth within the time before the AP exam was kind of cool. I wasn’t a huge fan of the fact that in order to get an 100% on the project you would have to complete 15 total assignments. I might be somewhat biased considering I don’t like doing work, but I figured that after the AP exam we wouldn’t have much to worry about besides the worst presidents tournament/occasional movie blogs. Maybe in the future fewer CYOA assignments will be required for full credit? I don’t really have a solution for this.

    5. America is a messed up country with a messed up history. I already knew that America was guilty of doing some truly horrible things, (Trail of Tears/Indian Removal, slavery + institutionalized racism, eugenics, etc) but as I was learning about more of the nuance surrounding these events, I was just stuck in this state of utter confusion. The fact that democratically elected officials could just do these things, the fact that people voted for said officials. It’s insane. Everything we see wrong with America today is the result of deeply problematic notions that were ingrained in this country’s upbringing.

  3. Kiera

    1. My favorite learning style this year has probably been watching videos and PowerPoint notes. I enjoyed the videos because I retain information better when I hear it so watching informational videos helped me with that. I also enjoyed documentaries because they weren’t just a video of a historian talking but they had videos and images to help imagine the scene better. This helped me because I thought they were very interesting and I stayed focused on watching them. I enjoyed the PowerPoint notes as well because I felt that writing everything down helped me remember everything said and the notes were more structured than just being on lined paper. I did not enjoy reading because when i read something it doesn’t always stick as well as hearing something so I found it hard to learn to my full capability while reading.
    2. I definitely wished we spent more time on the civil rights movement. I watched a few documentaries on it for my extra credit films but there is so much to learn about this time period and I would have really liked to cover more about it to grow a deeper understanding.
    3. I think we covered a lot of the first period specifically Columbus because it is usually a small portion of the actual exam. I think if we spent a little less time on these first units we could have had more time to cover some of the units we never got a chance to go in-depth in.
    4. I do think this new Choose your own adventure project was very interesting to learn about things that we never got a chance to. I enjoyed reading the articles because some of them still stay with us today, for example, I was reading the one about the AIDS epidemic and they mentioned how our generation doesn’t know much about it even though we are still eligible to be infected with the disease. One thing about the project that I didn’t love was the grading scale I think the set minimum should have been doing 7 activities because then to get the full 100% it would feel as much to get it all done.
    5. My big takeaway from American history is that we get into a lot of wars, some of which could have been easily avoided. I also learned many horrible things our country has done that have maybe been covered up by other teachers.

  4. Tyler C

    My favorite way to learn was by using the powerpoints because I didn’t have to write that much, and could annotate what I felt was important. It gave me more control over my learning. My least favorite way to learn was portraits. The information in the portraits was very useful as evidence on writing and the tests, but it felt very time inefficient. It felt like the articles could have been condensed into shorter lessons, and the reading usually took an hour or more, so it was often a bother to do on my weekend. I also liked to learn using the videos and the questions to go along with them. The videos felt a lot more engaging than a lecture, and the question sheet still felt like a very useful tool for review when studying for the tests.
    I wish we had spent much more time on the civil rights movement. I feel like we spent too much time on the early stuff, which wasn’t on the AP test a whole lot, compared to a lot of the more modern, 20th century stuff. I was excited to learn more about the different civil rights figures, like Malcolm X, who I’ve rarely learned about in my classes. It feels like the civil rights movement, and the 20th century’s figures are far more significant to our lives and society than the founding fathers, because they shape our current society more. People like John Lewis, for example, are very important to our current lives, because he was an activist even when young, which could serve as a role model to many, so it would’ve been good to learn about others like him, which might not be as focused on these days.
    I wish the early units when the US wasn’t still colonies, and we were learning about Columbus and that was shorter, because it felt like it didn’t show up on the AP test. I also think we spent a bit too much time on the early colonies, which siphoned time from later units, which were more prevalent on the test.
    I think the strengths of choosing your own adventure were that you could choose which type of the assignment to make up your number of them. Things like quizzes felt much more appealing to do a lot of the relevancy discussions, for example. I’d say the weaknesses were that there was just a lot to do. I wouldn’t say that’s a weakness though, because I did 14, and only did them in class.
    My short take away from APUSH is that American policy has been centered around the success of the white man since its humble creation.

  5. Ireland K.

    1.) My favorite learning style, especially when it came to studying for the APUSH Exam, was creating my own study guides and timelines. So writing/typing out definitions of people, events, and topics really helped me grasp and understand concepts more. Also for the exam I would color code things by period to help me correlate different time periods. I would also write out timelines to help me remember the order of events. One method of studying that did not work for me was reading the review book. I tried sitting down and reading it several times but it just wouldn’t really work for me. The reason for this was because I would kind of zone out and not full focus since there was so much information and the chapters were so long.

    2.) I wish we had spent more time on more recent stuff. I know we did choose your own adventure but I feel as though it would have been nice if we learned more together as a class. Plus the information that we learned towards the end felt really rushed which wasn’t the best. Specifically I wish we spent more time learning about the women’s rights movement since that is something I have always been interested in.

    3.) I feel as though the material we learned in the beginning was the most stuff we focused on. As time went on I feel as though we started to rush the material more, especially towards the end of the class. I wish we could have spread the material out more and gone more in depth with more topics.

    4.) I believe that the Choose Your Own Adventure project had both negatives and positives. I thought that the positive part of the project was that I got to choose what I wanted to learn and particularly focus on. The negative part of this project would be the amount of work I had to do to receive an A. At first I felt like 15 assignments was a lot but once I completed everything I realized it wasn’t really that bad. Plus I kinda wish that we would have just learned some of the interesting topics within this project as a class and that way I could understand and learn it in a non-pressure/non-graded way.

    5.) Overall I can say that APUSH has taught me so much about the history of the United States. Ranging from the time period of 1492 to the present, APUSH has helped me learn about the struggles and successes of our history. After the class I know I have come to better understand how our past has helped shape our present.

  6. Addison Wolfe

    1. My favorite learning style this year was doing the powerpoint notes. I think that being able to listen and take notes on everything that we were learning in a unit was way more beneficial for me than learning something on my own through review videos or even through using the review book. Doing the guided notes was also really helpful because we were all able to ask questions, which isn’t necessarily the case when we are doing our own assignment at home. Personally, my least favorite learning style was studying from the review book. I did not find that the information was very helpful for me, and it was just too much for me to be able to comprehend in one unit. I also felt like it was way more specific than it needed to be, and most of the time we only needed to understand the gist of a topic, whereas this book gave a whole description of everything that happened that was unnecessary for most of my studying.
    2. I wish we could have spent more time on learning the 1980s and on. I feel like that part of the content was very rushed and I didn’t really get a full understanding of what was going on at that time because we ended up learning around 30 years in only a week or so. I also think that there were some really interesting events that happened during that time that we could have dove deeper into that we really didn’t get to learn about.
    3. I wish that we hadn’t gone as deep into the mid 1800s because I felt like we spent a very long time on those years and not a lot of that ended up on the test. It felt like a lot of information and events happened during that time but it wasn’t really helpful for me in the long run.
    4. I think that there are definitely a lot of strengths and weaknesses to the Choose Your Own Adventure project. As for strengths, I like the idea of getting to decide generally what we learn about and getting to learn about all sorts of things in different ways. We could watch the videos, read articles, etc. I also liked the fact that we had a while to do the project and could kind of work at our own pace on it. As for weaknesses, I think that the way the project was described was a little confusing to me and 15 assignments was a lot. Personally I think the project would be more appealing to me if we had to do 5 or even 10 assignments and then could do a couple extra as an extra credit opportunity or something like that. I found that after I did 8 or so of the assignments, I wasn’t as interesting in what I was learning anymore and kind of just wanted to be done with the project.
    5. My main personal takeaway from being in APUSH was that I need to find a better way to manage my time. I procrastinate a lot more than I thought I did, and I definitely need to work on completing assignments quicker and sooner because they pile on very fast. As for the actual American history part of APUSH, I didn’t realize how much our country has truly changed since its beginnings, and it was genuinely interesting to hear about both the good and bad sides of our country.

  7. antonia p

    1. My favorite learning style was just talking about history because it allowed us to discuss our views on things while also hearing others’ opinions on different topics. With other ways like reading or just studying, it was really easy to zone out and just block out any noise. Another learning style that I also liked was watching videos though I like reading and stuff, sometimes it was easy to just zone out.
    2. There were no specific topics but I would have liked to have spent more time on the 60s and 70s as those years were pivotal in politics and pop culture as a whole. But specifically, I would have liked to have spent more time on the Cold War as I never really understand what it actually was. I just knew it was some type of conflict.
    3. I feel like we spent a lot of time on Imperialism. Though it is an important topic as that was how we got many territories, I felt with all the time we covered it, it became easier to just not pay attention. The topic itself was a bit more boring than the rest, but again still is important to go over, maybe just not spend as much time on it.
    4. CYOA was a bit fun being able to choose what to learn. There were 3 main ways to teach ourselves and helped as we all have different ways of learning. Being able to watch an episode of the CNN show and just write 15 questions I felt was easy, but time-consuming in terms of watching the episode. There were a variety of primary sources to analyze. In terms of articles, there were so many to choose from ranging from so many different topics. I was surprised when I found the article on Beatlemania. Taking article quizzes was easy, but I felt there could have been more in-class time available to take them. As a whole though, this assignment was a bit hefty in workload as besides this we had to do different blogs and work for other classes. I feel like if we had maybe gotten at least one more day in class it would have helped ease the load. Another positive though is that you provided the grading scale and just told us how much we need to do for a certain grade, that helped as many of us probably did not want to do 15 different ones for an A when we could have done less to still get around the same grade, and keep the overall grade we have in the class.
    5.From APUSH, I was able to learn about stuff I never truly thought about. From all the different laws the British put on us to Watergate.

  8. Enzo Morucci

    1. My favorite learning style was the powerpoint presentation. It may be because there was just a lot of information given to us at once, but I felt like I had learned a lot everytime class ended after a powerpoint presentation. It certainly helped that we had the powerpoint printed on paper, so we could follow along and when I was reviewing the powerpoint later I was able to read through my notes knowing exactly what we’re talking about and when we were talking about it, and it saved me from having to do a lot more unnecessary notes that likely would have meant me missing out on content because I would have been too busy writing down the previous sentences. My least favorite learning style was watching videos. While the videos were interesting enough, they often moved too fast to take accurate and good notes, and so I often missed out on part of what the video said as I was writing what happened in the video 5 seconds ago.
    2. For obvious reasons, I would have liked to cover the late 1900s. We didn’t get to cover it more than just skimming through in a review session. So much happened near the end of the 1900s, from corruption, to natural disasters, to huge movements, and I wish we could have gone more in depth into all of it. Doing research into Nixon and through the CYOA project, I realized how much stuff happened from the 50s on, and I think it would have been fun to go over it in more detail.
    3. I enjoyed all of the units we went over because they were pretty interesting, but if I had to choose one to be shorter so everything could fit in one year, I’d say the late 1800s/early 1900s. My impression is that we spent much more time covering that time period than others, because when it came to the practice and actual test, for every SAQ, the DBQ, and the LEQ options, I looked for anything in that time period because that’s the one we covered the longest and I remembered the best. It was useful to know more about a time period that is almost guaranteed to be on the test, but since I feel like we covered it for the most amount of time, that’s the most impactful unit to shorten.
    4. A definite strength of the CYOA was that it covered the time period we didn’t. It filled in the gaps in our knowledge of US history and it caught us up to the present day. Considering the amount of time we were given, the division of the project into 15 parts was another strength. It allowed us to divide the project up, and any day there is less homework, we can quickly finish one or two options here and there. If it had been one giant paper or something of the sort, I would have felt the need to finish it in one go, because otherwise I’d get an idea, not get it all down, and have to finish it another time, and by then I could have lost my train of thought. Consequently, the division helped a lot with organizing myself so that I could get all 15 in time. It also was nice to have a variety of options to undertake depending on what we preferred. A weakness of this project might be that it felt like a lot of busy work, but that’s not a big issue, because I also learned a lot from the articles and everything else.
    5. One major takeaway from this class is that progress is not linear. There are times where times progress extremely quickly, while other times it slows down or even goes backwards, but over the long run, things get better and technology gets better, and history progresses on. Another thing I learned is that historical idols are not always perfect, that those that are made into heroes are not always such, and that there’s always more than one way to view something, and that whenever something happens, there are always some that support it and some that are against it. Finally, I’ve learned that American history has been over glorified by many people involving many instances in history, and that this can be extremely dangerous. History is meant

  9. Noel Borgquist

    1.My favorite learning styles were writing, watching videos, and talking about history, and my least favorite learning methods were studying and reading. I really enjoyed learning about the content in class, and talking about it. History is one of my favorite subjects, so I usually have a lot of thoughts about subjects that I like to share, and I was able to express my position on topics in APUSH. Watching videos was pretty fun, as it is a little easier to follow in comparison to just straight up reading primary sources or other documents. I enjoyed writing things like DBQs and LEQs, as they helped me to improve my skills as a writer, and I got to put my ever circling thoughts about history down onto paper. I didn’t like studying outside of class, as I almost never opened the review book (just being point blank honest) and when I did, I struggled to pay attention and fully read over it.

    2.Obviously time constraints and increased periods of vacation in the 2nd and 3rd trimester make fully covering topics difficult, but I wish we had been able to spend more time on the 1920s onward. I felt that we didn’t get to talk very in depth about things like the 20s, 30s, and the world wars. We went over the largest aspects and factors, but I really felt us start to sprint through the mid to late 20th century. I felt like I had an extremely strong understanding of topics like the revolutionary war, civil war, reconstruction, gilded age, and more, but I felt a little lost after we had covered some of the later topics. I wish we had spent more time on the 60s specifically, as they are jam-packed with important events and social movements, and I believe that the 60s were the most influential time in bringing our country to the place that we are at today.

    3.I wish that we had spent a little less time on topics like the revolutionary war, as we have quite extensively studied the topic in earlier history topics. While it is an extremely important topic, I felt that we had over-covered it, and I felt like I got bored towards the end of the unit. While I recognize the significance of the early days of North America and the colonies, I felt that we spent a lot of time talking about it, and that it was disproportionate to the amount of content that we saw on the AP test pertaining to it.

    4.Overall, I thought that it was an interesting concept. But, I did feel myself feeling bogged down a little bit at the end of the work time where we had to turn it in. Obviously, this can be factored in through the fact that I am a rampant procrastinator, and hate to do work in advance. Had I spent more time out of class doing the odd one or two assignments in some of my free time, I am sure that I would have been able to have a much easier time wrapping up the project. I and many others of my classmates felt that it was a lot of work to be tacking on to the end of the year, and that we all would have preferred a lighter load of classwork / homework towards the end of the year, especially since we all have finals coming up, and the AP test had already concluded a month prior. When working on assignments like that of the primary source summary, I was a little confused on how I was going to approach the work, and unsure of what the goal of the assignment was. The majority of the directions were very clear, however I was left a little confused when working on the primary source aspect.

    5. I learned that in the face of change, there was almost always a group of people that were excluded and left out from that change. Most commonly, this was African Americans and Native Americans, as they were unable to receive benefits at all or in the same capacity that White Americans did up until even today.

  10. Zackary Norwood

    1. I personally liked the documentaries the most because I’m a visual learner and the films help immerse you in the content you need to memorize, and the notes were less exhaustive which helped prevent a burn out where I was no longer interested in the topic. My least favorite would have to be the PowerPoint because even though it is good for summarizing info, it was a bore to me, and I found it hard to actually pay attention to it as it was just bland. I also felt that the skeleton note style of the PowerPoint was flawed in that is skipped over too much information that if I didn’t hear you say it, I just didn’t learn it.
    2. War history. My family has a lot of WW2/Vietnam war vets in it which led to me taking a large interest in war history. One of my favorite parts of the world history class was the (However brief) ww2 and revolutionary war history. We even learned a bit a medieval/Mongolian warfare. So my hope going into this class was that there may be more of that, but it seems we skipped over (almost) all war history, which was a large disappointment to me. I feel that we could have at least gone over the specifics of the war of 1812 which was full of monumental battles.
    3. My personal choice would be slavery and a bit of civil rights. Every year since the sixth grade we have been told not only by our history teachers, but also our English teachers about the evils of slavery and the gaining of African American rights. Not to discredit the importance of this topic but come on, we get it. Almost all the history after the revolutionary war is overshadowed by the same topic that we learn over, and over, and over again. After all, it’s called AMERICAN history, not civil rights history.
    4. The main strength is a bit obvious, but it was the ability to learn topics you actually wanted to read about. Like I said, we didn’t learn almost anything about war history in America, but some of the Vietnam sources went over it vaguely (still overfocused on anti war sentiment, but something nonetheless)
    5. In APUSH you learn about all history, whether dark or light. And to truly understand all history, it is good to take this course as it tells you about some of the evils of history that you otherwise would never find out about. But this also comes with so much content that some topics you truly like/care about get overshadowed by others.

  11. Christina Jones

    1.My favorite learning style this year had to be the power points/videos, just because I learn the best when someone’s talking to me and relaying information and explaining it, so I can write it down in a way that I understand it, and look at it later to try to remember it. My least favorite way to learn is reading, because sometimes, despite the fact that all the information is on the page, I have to pay attention more in order to find crucial information, and I just don’t learn that way because my focus isn’t great when I’m reading.

    2.We only touched on the Civil Rights Movement very briefly, and I think that we definitely should have taken more time on that, because I learned more from 2 primary sources than I did in class, but I would have liked to spend more time on it, just because that’s something I’m passionate about. WW2 and WW1 we didn’t really go over at all, nor the Vietnam war really, so it was kind of hard to get a grasp on those topics.

    3.The only unit I remember us delving really deep into was the industrial revolution and immigration, when everyone moved to the cities and stuff. That didn’t really have any relevance on the test, and maybe I’m only thinking that we spent a lot of time on it because of that book we had to read, but I think if we wouldn’ve moved a little faster through the monopolies and stuff we would’ve had more time to go over more relevant things and we would’ve gotten deeper into the years.

    4.Weaknesses was that it felt like busy work, and it took up a lot of my time at the end of the year when I was trying to focus on finals because I have other classes that I need to worry about, I can’t spend all my time on one class. The strength was that I could learn about what I wanted to learn about and focus all my attention on that topic, which I ignored. I learned about the Civil Rights movement mostly, because we didn’t get to that in class.

    5. I learned that our past as a country is what makes us so messed up now, and that it’s always been this way, just in different ways. I feel like we all say that this time period is so bad and violence is so high nowadays, but it’s really been the same way since the beginning of the country, the violence has just manifested itself in other ways.

  12. Will Dabish

    1. My favorite style of learning was definitely the open discussions. I like being able to talk more openly about a topic, and seeing the conversation evolve into different facets about a specific idea is super fun. I enjoy hearing all my classmates’ take on issues, and seeing other points of view from people in different situations than I’m in is always good. I can’t get behind the power-point learning, though. It’s just not for me, it’s pretty boring and a definite step down from when we’re discussing.

    2. I would’ve liked to spend more time on the 70s onward. Obviously, due to time constraints, we couldn’t dwell on much of the material too much, but that era of politics, culture, and world events is super interesting to me. That’s why I liked the Choose Your Own Adventure project; it let me spend more time on topics I enjoyed learning about from that era.

    3. I wish we spent a little less time on those first few chapters with the pre-English America. Not that it isn’t interesting material (it still is cool), it’s just that it felt like we spent more time on those units and that forced us to move faster later on in the year. I get that we need an intro to the class, but it felt as though it didn’t get started fast enough (for my liking).

    4. I really liked the Choose Your Own Adventure project. My biggest gripe is the ambiguity about the grading. I feel like it should’ve just been a concrete number for the credit. For example, if you do 10 adventures, you get an 88. You do 11, it’s a 91. A simpler grading scale would help me out a ton. The Google Drive was also a little laggy (at least on my end). Other than that I enjoyed the project. The quizzes were the easiest and quickest, but that isn’t really a bad thing. The primary sources were super interesting to look into. The CNN docs were more about the culture, which I greatly enjoyed. I liked the relevancy discussions because it gives us a fuller understanding of how culture works, and though a full page is a little long for the article summaries, it wasn’t that bad. I’d prefer a word count requirement for those instead of a full page.

    5. My biggest takeaway from APUSH is a greater understanding of how the country got to the place it is now. Looking at the evolution of guns in the US, economic policy, corruption, the culture around “non-standard” people, foreign policy, military policy, and other general politics made me think more about how the culture we live in has been pieced together.

  13. Ryan Cifolelli

    1. A lot of our time this year has been spent reading, writing, studying, watching videos, reflecting, and talking about American history. Discuss what your favorite learning style was this year and why it was effective for you. Also, explain which was your least favorite way to learn and explain why it doesn’t work for you.

    My favorite learning style throughout this year was going through the slideshow notes and taking notes off of the slideshows. Throughout this year, we went through a lot of slideshows and took notes on a lot of things during every trimester. This learning style was a very effective tool for me because it allowed me to sort of visually see how history went down in a timeline. The way I saw it, I saw every single slide as a portion of history and when we broke it down like that I could see what specifically happened at different points of time which helped me to learn everything in the unit. My least favorite way to learn throughout this trimester was by reading and responding to the portrait. I disliked this way of learning because the portraits were very time consuming and sometimes took me up to five hours to complete them. The portraits didn’t work for me because I didn’t really learn anything from them and I was only looking through them to find the answers and get them done. I never learned anything that could have been used in class from them and they were very time consuming.

    2. We studied a lot of stuff this year – from the Pilgrims to the Revolution to Andrew Jackson (soon to be leaving the $20, or not) to Abe Lincoln to Alice Paul to the Depression and the Civil Rights Movement. What did you wish we had spent more time on than we did this year and why?

    I think we should have spent more time learning about World War Two and what actually happened in the battles. Throughout the year, when we reached a point in history where America ended up getting into a war we never really learned anything about what happened in the war. We mostly just talked about the causes and effects of every war throughout the whole year. We never talked about how the tides of the war changed or new technologies that were made during the war. I wish we knew more about war history because it really interests me and it was a main topic I wanted to learn about this year. I wish we learned more about it because it is interesting and it is useful information that we never talked about.

    3. Yep, we studied a whole lot of stuff this year, but I bet you wish there were some units that were shorter or didn’t go as in depth. What did you wish we had studied less of and explain why (keep in mind that if the info didn’t make it onto the test doesn’t mean it won’t be there next year)?

    One unit that I wish we learned less about would be the industrial revolution unit. From the 1880s to the 1910s we learned about how industrial giants like Carnegie and Rockefeller took over the markets and practiced social darwinism. To me, this was the most boring unit that we did because we talked a lot about the same things over and over. During this unit, we never really learned anything new and we just rehashed things that we already learned throughout the whole unit. I wish we studied less of this because this unit took up a whole two months and it just felt very repetitive. It took time away from more interesting things in the late 1900s and it was overall too long of a unit.

    4. Choose Your Own Adventure was a brand new wrinkle that I had introduced this year and never done something like this before. What do you think were some of the strengths and weaknesses of this project? Explain why.

    One strength of the Choose Your Own Adventure project was that it allowed me to pick the type of assignments that I wanted to complete. I liked this aspect of the project because if I only wanted to do one article summary and eight quizzes I could do that. Also, I liked how I could choose what decade I wanted to learn about. This gave me an opportunity to learn about anything that I wanted to and spend time on one specific topic which was very beneficial to me. That is one thing that I really liked about the project. Though, one thing that I disliked about the project was how many assignments we had to do to get a one hundred percent on it. I think that Choose Your Own Adventure should be cut down to twelve projects in total from fifteen. I think this would be an improvement as fifteen assignments was a lot to do with the president’s project and I felt really overwhelmed at times. I think we should have either the Choose Your Own Adventure project or the president’s project but not both. Together, they take a long time and are really overwhelming.

    5. People talk a lot about takeaways – a summary of an experience, distilled down to one or two sentences. What is your takeaway from APUSH (or in other words, what did you truly learn about American history)?

    Throughout this year, I learned how history is always changing and how everything affects something else. I learn how small changes can lead to big differences throughout the country. In this year of AP Us History I learned how history is always changing and everything is important in its own way.

  14. Jacob Becker

    My favorite learning style was by far the movies and informational documentaries. This method of learning I felt got the information to resonate in my head better. My least favorite way to learn was portraits. I felt that the portraits were often too long and tedious to have any meaning to me.

    I wish that we spent more time on war history. After the AP test I think that the class should collectivley watch movies that represent wars or watch documentaries and anyalaze the significance of wars and or specific events. I feel that studying these events would bring a deeper meaning and understanding to war ang give a more front lines perpective that would entertaining as well as interesting. I feel like saving private Ryan or even inglorious bastards would show the war in a entertains way.

    I wish that we studied less about the post reconstruction and industrial revolution era. I felt as if this time was wasted and overall not very interesting nor relevant. If we as a class speeded more time on the more interesting stuff, I feel as though it would give a better sense and more meaning into the boring stuff.

    I felt that choosing your own adventure was a flawed idea that was a bit more than I feel that us students expected. I feel as though it was too long and overall did not accomplish its goal of helping us learn. Instead I felt as if I had to cram in order to get the work done. The only strength to choose your own adventure was its options and overall utility that you had to do it. Choosing your own adventure was aggravating for us students and was way too stressful for me. Especially considering the time frame that we had to do it. I would probably suggest toning it down or just removing it altogether as it did not accomplish what it was intended for and it most certainly did not help me get a more in depth understanding of the topic of my choice. If you were to do it again, then I would strongly suggest that you change from ten to fifteen and maybe limit the amount of article quizzes. That would make it more in depth and sort of interesting for us students.

    My biggest takeaway from Apush is that history is important but very complicated. I learned that people use history to mislead people and often use it to justify acts of cruelty against minorities. Most importantly, I learned that American History is controversial and should be interpreted with understanding.

  15. Gio Baldini

    1. My favorite learning style was definitely writing. With writing, I could look at it as many times as I please, both reading it several times at the moment and reading it later on when studying for tests and exams. With that, I could retain the information given to me quickly and well, whereas when it came to listening to someone speak, I could only hear it once. This brings me to my least favorite learning style, which is talking. When it was just talking, if I were to just lose focus for 30 seconds, I missed so much information that could never be recovered, and when we are speeding as fast as possible through content, I got lost on a lot of things since I’d lose focus every once in a while. So, a lot of stuff couldn’t get retained for me since I couldn’t repeat it.
    2. I wish we spent more time in the late 20th century. Obviously, we couldn’t afford that with the time crunch we had, but I just wish we could’ve talked more about it. A lot of very important impactful events that are referenced and are more important in modern-day culture happened more recently, specifically in the 20th century. I do wish we spent more time on the imperialistic era of our history since that was a complete newsflash to me, and I never knew we did anything even related to imperialism. We did talk a lot about that topic, but I do wish we did even more since it was so shocking to me. Lastly, I also wish we talked more about the market revolution era of U.S. history. I really didn’t know anything about it until I studied for the AP Exam so I feel like if we talked more about it I could’ve seen how things occurred in our past to shape our history today.
    3. I do wish we had studied less of the first units(1492-1776). I understand it is a big time period, and I guess some important stuff happened, but I felt like we spent a lot of time on it that just wasn’t very interesting to me. So, I wish we went less into detail for this period since it wasn’t very interesting and impactful. I also wish we spent less time on the Jacksonian era. I felt like it was a ton of information that wasn’t very test-worthy, and not very impactful.
    4. I really liked the versatility of this project. I could study whatever interested me or I didn’t know much about so that definitely was a major pro. Another thing I liked about this project was you could pick whatever assignment type you preferred. I liked doing the article summaries and quizzes, while other people liked the video questions more, so we could all do what we want. The only thing I wish would be changed about this project is the workload. I felt like it was a lot of work, and to get that 100%, you really needed to do a lot of work. Fortunately, I had a very chill trimester, so I was able to complete a lot of work in other classes, but if this was my work tri, I would’ve definitely had to spend a lot of time at home.
    5. AP classes aren’t that bad. Just stay focused, take the time, and work hard, and you’ll be happy.

  16. Isabella G Ruggirello

    1.)I can’t really say I hated anything we did, aside from not liking the portraits so much. I just found myself putting them off and not wanting to do them. That didn’t really happen for anything else we did. They really weren’t that bad, they were just very time-consuming and took a lot of critical thinking. I thought the powerpoints were very helpful, especially for studying later. They helped also to refresh my memory before the AP test too. I didn’t like the group work that much either. I tend to learn best by myself and it’s hard to only study a certain part of a topic and never really go back to learn the rest. I enjoyed the videos and I almost wish there had been more, but I feel like it was nicely balanced. I found Quizlet very helpful, especially before a test. I didn’t like reading all that much, just because it was just an insane amount of information to take in at once. But I overall did enjoy it.

    2.) I really really wish we had spent more time in the 1900s. It’s just such an intriguing period to me, and I find I want to keep learning about it, even now after doing the choose your adventure, I’m still open to learning more about the 1900s. I found the few things we did learn very interesting and ill most likely remember that information for the longest. I feel like the 1900s pay the most to what happened in the 2000s and I truly do love learning about all the change that still affects us today.

    3.) The few units we didn’t study as much as I hoped were the late 1880s and the late 1900s. I kind of wished we spent less time on the 16 and 1700s s we had more time for later periods. I feel like it become very rushed and we crammed so much information before the AP test, and there was some stuff we didn’t learn at all.

    4.) I liked the project, but it was a lot of work. I liked that we got the opportunity to research on our own, but I also feel like it was a bit too confined to what was in google drive. I was hoping after the AP the workload would slow down a bit, and the required 15 assignments for a not even guaranteed A is kinda rough. The only thing id change is the assignment amount required to get an A. but otherwise, I enjoyed researching at my own pace.

    5.) America has many problems and always had many problems, no matter what period we learned about, it seemed there was always something going wrong. There were a lot of things America got itself involved in that could’ve been avoided so easily. I learned how the past has influenced so many of the things that happen today.

  17. kaylin arthur

    My favorite learning style this year was by watching the Heimler’s History videos. I liked this method because it explained things in a way that made more sense to me, and it explained it in order like a story. I used this method especially when studying for the AP test, but also when studying for the tests throughout this class. I noticed that when I used these videos, I understood the content better and did better on the tests. It also fit all of the information from that period into a 30 minute video of the essential information. Something that did not work well for me was reading right from the review book. I tried this method many times throughout the year and tried it again at the end before the AP test. I think this didn’t work for me because it was filled with so many facts that it felt overwhelming, and I thought I had to memorize them in order to be successful on the test.
    One thing I wish we spent more time on was the Civil Rights movement, Women’s Rights movement, and the other major movements throughout Period 9. I wish we spent more time on these because they shaped so much of our history today and we still have the results of these major movements and see how they affect our daily lives. Another topic I wish we covered more was the regional and sectional differences between the colonies. I wish we spent more time on this because it came up on the AP test and I wished I learned more about these differences.
    One unit I wish we didn’t spend as much time on was the first unit about Columbus. I think it had information that we already knew about because of the summer homework, and things we learned over the years. I think if we spent less time on this, we may have had time to focus on the units that were cut short or not explored as much.
    I think this project was unique because it allowed us to learn the things we didn’t learn before the test. I liked reading the different articles because many of them are still relevant today. After the AP test was over, I thought the workload would slow down. However, I feel like there was a very large amount of work I had to do to only possibly receive an A on the project. I did all 15 adventures, which took a while, but looking back on it it was not that bad.
    I think American history can be summed up with us taking land from others, wars, sometimes having peace, and inequality. Overall, I learned a lot during this class which helped me to better understand the country as a whole.

  18. Samantha Jacobs

    1. The learning style that was most effective for me this year was taking PowerPoint notes. It forced me to pay attention to every word you said because I had to write it down its general idea. The slides also provided good visual representation, and the detail you turned the information into a story, rather than a simple sequence of events, making it engaging and interesting.
    My least favorite way to learn was going over notes/handouts that you had already put the information on. They often looked something like this…
    I didn’t like this learning style because it wasn’t engaging. It is hard to retain information that is simply given to you. You have to take PowerPoint notes for yourself, these are already taken for you. I didn’t have to work for the information, so it never really stuck in my mind.

    2. I wish we had spent more time on WWI. I feel like we didn’t spend enough time on this topic because, when we moved on from it, I felt like I didn’t know anything about it. I still don’t understand it. This may have just been me, but I feel like we could have spent more time on the subject.

    3. If I had to pick something to not go as in-depth on, I would suggest industrialization. I enjoyed the era because it had a lot more to do with society than memorizing who won a war and different pieces of legislation. However, we seemed to study it for a longer period of time than we did other units, and much of the information overlapped.

    4. Choose Your Own Adventure was… a lot. There was an overwhelming number of tasks and stimuli. The number of options for primary sources and videos was vast, but provided welcome choice in what we focused on. I recommend a reduction in the number of tasks required. If we had only been assigned the Choose Your Own Adventure, these last few weeks would have been much less overwhelming. However, with the addition of the Worst President tournament and the assignments that came with it, the movies and blog posts, and the final exam tasks, there was a vast amount of work to get done. (This is an opinion that many of my peers and I shared.) It would have been more manageable if the number of tasks were reduced. For this reason, I say that the number of tasks that were assigned in the project was its biggest weakness, and the number of options was its greatest strength. Another strength was that the instructions were very clear, making it easy to understand what was supposed to be done for each assignment. However, the initial description of the project was confusing, making it hard for me to get started on the project.

    5. American history is complicated. We are historically entitled and have a sense of self-importance and superiority.

  19. Augusten L

    1. My favorite learning style for this class was taking notes from the powerpoints or videos and watching review videos that were posted on Schoology. This was effective for me to learn because writing down the information helps me remember it more and also gives me something to look back on the review for tests or assignments. I also think that doing the practice DBQ, LEQ, and SAQ essays, as well as the practice AP tests were extremely helpful in preparing for the test. I liked that it gave me an idea of what the test would actually be like to take, so I would know how to balance my time. My least favorite learning style was reading the review book. Even though it did have important information, reading it was easy for me to forget and was also very time consuming compared to other ways to learn the information.
    2. I wish that we had spent more time learning about the Constitution itself during APUSH. It is really important and was referenced in many of the court cases we learned about in class, so I think it could be beneficial to learn more about it. I would also like to have learned more about more recent events. Even though we did have the review session covering it, and the choose your own adventure project, I would have liked to have a more in depth lesson on recent history. These events are really important to the world right now, so it could be helpful to learn more about things that weren’t as long ago. Recent historical events are things that the adults around us have experienced firsthand, so learning about them is extremely relevant.
    3. I think that we spent a lot of time on period one, when it didn’t seem like it was very important on the test. While it is extremely important that we do learn about early history, I thought it was a little too long to spend on the unit because it gave us less time to learn about other United States history.
    I thought that this was overall a really good project because it was much more enjoyable to be able to choose what I learn about.
    4. Some of the strengths of Choose Your Own Adventure are that being able to decide what we learn about means that we can choose things that are important to us. Some topics can be more appealing to certain people, and I liked that I was able to learn about history that I found interesting and believed was important. One of the weaknesses of this project could be that some events in history are overlooked if they don’t seem as fun to learn about. I know that most people chose assignments that had interesting titles or headlines because they appeared to be the most enjoyable to learn about. This might allow some of the more boring, but still important pieces of history to be overlooked.
    5. One of the takeaways from this class was that American history is often made to seem very heroic and successful, when in reality, there were a lot of bad events that happened in American history. I also learned how important and relevant history is to modern times and how US history shaped what it is like today.

  20. Jackson Mush

    1. Though it was boring some days, the most effective learning style for me was just grinding out PowerPoints. For me when I’m writing down information while also hearing Wickersham talk about it was very easy for me to retain the information. My least favorite way to learn is through videos because I don’t feel that I can focus too well while watching a video. Sometimes I’d catch myself just watching the video instead of taking notes. Both methods of learning have their pros and cons but overall I think I learned more when we just did PowerPoints.
    2. I wish we covered the 90’s a little bit more, especially with the fall of the soviet Union. I wish we covered this unit a little bit more because this history is more recent and we still see some of the effects today. Also my parents lived through this time period so if we learned more I could maybe talk to them about it.
    3. I think a unit we spent a lot of time on and should have spent less time on was basically from Christopher Columbus to the start of the colonies. I felt like these few chapters had some irrelevant information and because it was the first chapter I didn’t know that most of it wouldn’t be on the tests. Also these chapters are barely covered on the AP exam so I think we could have spent less time here and more time on a more in depth chapter.
    4. I think some strengths of Choose your own adventure would be that it was a more open-ended assignment, hence the name. Because we got to choose what we learned about, typically we would dive deeper into topics that interested us more. Another strength of this project was that you decided how many assignments you wanted to do in order to get a score that you wanted. With any other project you’d have to fully complete it to earn points but for this one that wasn’t the case. Overall this project offered more freedom to learn what we wanted to. When it comes to weaknesses of this project, this is pretty obvious but 15 assignments was kind of a lot just to earn full credit. Maybe in the future the scoring system could be tweaked a little but overall a fun project.
    5. What I’ve learned from American history is that history does truly repeat itself. Learn from your past mistakes or you’ll be bound to mess up again.

  21. Zach S

    1. I think the style of learning that worked for me was taking notes during the powerpoint presentations. Without taking notes, it is hard to study for tests, as simply searching up an Apush topic online results in too much information. My notes allowed me to review the biggest points of each period in a way that was quick and easy to understand. My least favorite learning style by far was the portrait assignments. They were incredibly time consuming, and it felt much more like busywork, since each of the portraits highlights individual stories instead of broader historical information. For me, it was hard to focus long enough to read through the portrait, and develop complex paragraph answers.

    2. I wish we spent more time on the Cold War. I feel like I didn’t completely understand the Cold War until I had studied Cold War presidents like Ronald Reagan during the CYOA assignment. Also, I wish we had the time to go over period 9 of APUSH. Although we talked a little about the AIDS epidemic and the war on terror, we didn’t really go in depth as we had in the other periods. This was somewhat disappointing, as much of the events and legislation of period 9 directly affect us today, unlike many of the other periods of American history.

    3. I think we spent too much time talking about Christopher Columbus and the early colonies, since periods one and two are only 4-6% and 8-10% of the APUSH exam, compared to 10-17% for the other periods. Considering these units had much less material than later ones, we definitely could have gone through them quicker. The extra time gained could have been spent on other more complex units, like the ones I mentioned in the previous question.

    4 .The biggest strength of the Choose Your Own Adventure project was that we could choose what topics we wanted to study, and which assignments we wanted to do. Personally, I enjoyed learning in depth about the Vietnam War and the My Lai massacre through the videos and articles. The biggest weakness of CYOA was that some of the assignments took very long, and the goal of 15 assignments was too high, especially considering the limited amount of work days we had. It would have been much better if only 12 or so assignments were needed to get 100%.

    5. Since its birth, America has been a complicated nation that has continually dealt with issues of economic and political turmoil, discrimination, violence, and racism. America’s past has been smeared with violence and hatred, yet progress is ongoing and there is always hope for a future without such issues.

  22. Asher Leopold

    1. I think my favorite learning styles this year were by taking notes on the powerpoints and taking notes on videos. This is the best way that I personally learn because writing makes me remember it and the powerpoints were great study resources. I also really liked AP writing style tests and I wish we could have done more and started doing them sooner because they most definitely helped me understand what they AP test was going to look like and how to practice for that specifically. My least favorite style was probably things like portraits because I would always wait till the last minute to do them and then not really learn anything since I was rushing and only reading to look for the answers to the questions.

    2. I for sure wish we spent more time on the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights movement because these were all key moments during the 20th century and I felt a little iffy on them since we were rushing. WW1 more than WW2 because I still do not feel like I know what happened during WW1, only really trhe effects. I feel like we got the big ideas about the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement because they are both important historical topics and they interest me. Lastly, I wish we learned a little more about the end of the 20th century with Reagan and stuff because we never really covered that except during that study session. Again, I know this is all because we were rushing and had to cover as much as we possibly could before the test, but I wish we could have learned a little more about these topics.

    3. I wish we covered a little less of the very beginning units like pre-colonial America and pre-revolution America. While I believe these are super important things to know, I feel like the beginning of the year was spent learning a lot of detail which is helpful and interesting, but sometimes wasted valuable time. I feel like we should have covered more big ideas in the earlier units more than super specific facts because then we could have gotten done faster and we might have had time to learn more of what we needed to about the later 1900s. I honestkly loved learning all the detail because history is super interesting to me, but looking back, I feel like we could have used some of that time more efficiently to be more prepared for the test (even though there was not much about the cold war, civil rights movement, etc on the test but there could have been and an LEQ prompt was about the CRM).

    4. I think that a strength of the choose your own adventure was that we still had stuff to do even when you were gone and we could study the topics we were interested in. I think it was very helpful to stay on task. I think the weaknesses of it was that there were specific mediums you still had to do even if you were more confident in another and that the required amount was 5 but that meant only a 75% because that made me feel like I had to rush more. Kind of off topic, but I also feel like it was difficult to do in tandem with the blogs, it just felt like I was stressing even more than with APUSH when you were here. I feel like the choose your own adventure was a great activity and that it should be used next year, just maybe with a little tweaking.

    5. To be honest, I learned that American History is full of contradictions. We need to be free from the British but we wont give black people or women that same freedom, we should be imperialist and take over the Philipenes and Hawai’i but we go to war with the Spanish because they are doing the same to Cuba. My main takeaway is that American history is super hypocritical and that you really have to pay attention to understand and process it.

  23. Claire P

    1. Taking notes on the slideshows was my favorite and most effective learning style. It was similar to guided notes in the fact that each slide was already an important event or topic. This allowed me to write down what I thought was important and elaborate as much, or as little, as I pleased. The slideshows were typically my first step when I began studying for a test. On the flip slide, learning from my peers didn’t really work for me. I was often confused or didn’t comprehend the material that my peers were teaching me when we would break off into smaller groups and then share our findings. Sometimes information would be wrong or they would miss a key point, so in the long run I was more confused.

    2. I think we covered the earlier units more than the later ones, such as Columbus or the American Revolution. I would have liked to spend more time on some of the more recent units, including the Cold War, Vietnam, Civil Rights, and Watergate. I was still confused by some of these going into the AP test, so I wish we covered them more in dept like the previous units. I was also intrigued to learn more about these because they are much closer in history to where we are now, like I know people who were alive during this time.

    3. I don’t know if there is a specific unit or topic I wished we covered less. Possibly Columbus because we spent weeks on him and I felt like we were talking in circles half the time. I would have liked it if time was more evenly distributed between the units because I felt like we had plenty of time at the beginning of the year but were rushing right before the AP test.

    4. I thought the concept of the choice your own adventure project was interesting, but I didn’t love how it was set up. One of the weaknesses of the project was how many assignments there were. Even though we didn’t need to do them all, many people still felt like they had to. This made it difficult to really take in the content because right after you did something from the 1950s you were rushing to do the next assignment in the 2000s. There weren’t enough sources in one time period that were directly related so you could dive deeper into that topic. I feel like I only got to the surface level, if that, of the topics I did my assignments on. I think one of the strengths of the assignment was the article. I liked the articles sprinkled throughout the year. It was a great way to quickly learn about a new event and they were fairly simple to understand. I think opening up these articles to students can be very helpful. Overall, I think if the project was changed to fewer assignments and more focused on one topic students would be better off. They could conduct their own research and produce a poster or slideshow revolving around the content they learned. This would also allow students to choose a topic they are interested in.

    5. There is no perfect way to sum up American history. There were good moments and there were bad, there were even some that can’t entirely be classified as good or bad. It was interesting to not only learn about actual events but the people responsible for them. APUSH has given me a better perspective in life today and what has brought our country here.

  24. Lindsay kennedy

    1.One of my favorite learning styles this year was watching documentaries and answering questions. Personally I learn better when I watch videos, it keeps me entertained and engaged. I really liked the documentary about civil rights court cases. I also liked the Oregon trail activity. Not only was it fun but it made you have to strategically plan and make sacrifices and tough decisions. Having that experience gave us a good understanding of what people on the Oregon trail went through and how they felt. I would like to see more activities like this in the future for the incoming students. Personally I was never a big fan of article quizzes. I noticed that many of my classmates never read the article until the last minute and personally the information from the article never really sunk in.

    2. I like anything past period 3. The early history really just bored me. As a student we’ve always been taught the early founding of America and I’d rather spend time learning history closer to the present day. I think civil rights is the most interesting, especially because it’s not that far removed from today. The parallel between the civil rights movement and recent minority movements makes it all the more interesting.

    3.As i said in question two im sick of learning the early history of America. I’m so tired of hearing Christopher Columbus’s name.Its the same old story over and over again. The civil rights era is rich in history and principles. When we learn the early history I want to know about Mayan civilization , and other early civilizations. I know its American History but I wanna know more about other countries and how they correspond to America’s early history.

    4. I can’t say Choose your own adventure was my favorite truthfully. It wasn’t bad, I liked the article summaries and relevancy discussions. The primary source assignment was not my cup of tea. I think the Primary sources assignment was actually a good idea because it makes you annualize documents but it just felt tedious. I think the freedom to explore history on your own was very fun and I would like to explore time periods after the 2000, any history rather than a specific time period.

    5.My biggest takeaway is personal. Being my first AP class I had to work on my work ethic and mindset. With the workload I had to prioritize and make sacrifices to keep up with it. I also had to find a balance so that I didn’t lose my mind.The experience is Definitely gonna help me in my Junior AP classes.

  25. Lauren M

    Anytime we discussed a reading/video/given topic openly was when I found that I was most engaged and learned the most. I believe this to be because in listening to others’ opinions and formulating my own, it is more necessary to absorb the information and it is absorbed more subconsciously, which, if I am correct, is more useful. Additionally, this has the added benefit of highlighting the different perspectives of historical figures and students alike.
    I wish we had spent more time learning about the abolitionist movement on a more personal level. I feel we spent a lot of time on the political level, and I know that is what is on the test, but I felt aside from the Frederick Douglass reading, there is a much richer history there that we sort of skimmed over.
    I think the lesson on the French and Indian War could be shortened. It was highly important as a catalyst for the Revolutionary War, but I feel as if we dug a lot deeper into the play-by-play of the war than was strictly necessary for both the test and overall learning. The overall impact of the war is prominent in the course, however, there were very few questions on the war itself on any practice tests or the actual tests, and I recall learning a lot more about it than I believe we needed.
    I, firstly, think the Choose your own Adventure was a burden on you and I hope you are okay. I believe the main issue would definitely be the grading required on your part and the overall (I felt) disorganization of the project. However, I think generally, Choose Your Own Adventure was definitely a strong idea. I enjoyed being able to learn about what I wanted, how I wanted, so I could take reading comprehension tests and watch videos about music to my heart’s desire. I also think that self-motivation and organization required not only to do well but to get a grade better than passing is a good skill to have going into junior year.
    History, of any kind, is more fluid and layered than the average American can possibly imagine. While American History is undoubtedly short, it is jampacked with change on the political and personal levels. Understanding these narratives not as far-off people but as our own history is imperative to changing how we view each other and the world, and it starts by learning to study properly and take notes.

  26. Renna Robinson

    1. My favorite learning style this year was doing group discussions. Whether we read an article before the discussion, watched a movie, or had no preparation, I feel like I learned topics better by having to talk about them and hear from different perspectives about them. Having to vocalize our thoughts about any topic also helps me to actually retain the information rather than forgetting half of what we learn, especially when I’m already tired. That’s what we did in AP gov almost every day, which I really loved because it was easy to unpack all the information in one conversation a day. This method also allowed students to ask questions about things they are unclear about, and what Mr. Van Ermen did was step back and see if any other students could help the student understand. Making us answer to each other was a great method because we were forced to think more critically about everything rather than just listening. For the same reason, my least favorite learning style is daily presentations. For the record, you are very funny Mr Wickersham, and I did enjoy the class and I learned a lot. However, I did feel that I wasn’t able to remember things very well when it was the same presentation most days and I wasn’t forced to be on my toes thinking about the content.
    2. I wish we spent more time on the later decades that we didn’t really get to, especially up to more recent years. I think this era is more relevant to us and our understanding of the country today, although I understand how difficult it is to cover all the content before the AP exam.
    3. I actually feel like we had a pretty good split of all the content. I do feel like the portraits were unnecessary because they went into so much detail about each topic. I didn’t mind that they were time consuming as much as the fact that we could have spent two hours studying for the content we needed to have a general understanding of rather than two hours of details on one specific textile mill. I think our time could be used much better, even if that means a different longer assignment.
    4. I liked Choose Your Own Adventure, however I think we should have had more class time to do it. I found myself taking shortcuts that I would rather not take (like skimming sources rather than reading them fully for comprehension) just to finish all the work in addition to the blogs and studying for all my finals. I think a lot of people were in the same boat for that. However, I liked being able to choose which topic I wanted to research.
    5. I definitely learned more about the extent to which traditional history books do not represent the reality of American history, especially the racism and cruelty behind many of the government’s actions. I’m glad I had you as a teacher because I know how much you tried to emphasize that and you did a great job teaching us about it.

  27. Titus Smith

    1.This year, my preferred learning style has revolved around watching videos and utilizing PowerPoint notes. Videos have been particularly effective for me as I tend to retain information better through hearing it. Engaging with informational videos has greatly aided my learning process. I’ve also found documentaries to be immensely enjoyable as they offer more than just a historian speaking; incorporating videos and images enhances my ability to envision the scenes being discussed. This not only captures my interest but also helps me maintain focus throughout. Another aspect I appreciated was using PowerPoint notes. I discovered that jotting down everything aided my memory retention, and the structured format of the notes provided greater organization compared to plain lined paper. However, reading alone didn’t resonate well with me as the information often didn’t stick as effectively as when I heard it. Consequently, I found it challenging to reach my full learning potential through reading alone.
    2.I certainly felt that we should have dedicated more time to studying the civil rights movement. While I managed to watch a few documentaries on the topic for extra credit, there is an abundance of information to dive into regarding this pivotal time period. I genuinely wished we had explored it more extensively in order to develop deeper comprehension and appreciation.
    3.It seemed to me that we dedicated a significant amount of time to the first period, particularly focusing on Columbus. If we had slightly reduced the time spent on the first units, we could have had more opportunities to thoroughly explore other units that we didn’t get the chance to study in detail. I think my feelings are amplified since the first units weren’t very pivotal parts of the AP exam, so it seemed like a waste of time.
    4.The Choose Your Own Adventure project has its fair share of strengths and weaknesses. I appreciate the concept of having the freedom to determine the general topic of our learning and exploring various subjects through different mediums like videos and articles. Additionally, having ample time to work on the project at our own pace was positive. However, there were also weaknesses that I observed. The project description itself felt somewhat confusing, making it difficult for me to grasp its requirements initially. Moreover, the sheer number of assignments, with 15 was slightly overwhelming. Personally, I believe the project would have been more engaging if we were assigned 5 or even 10 assignments, with the possibility of pursuing additional ones for extra credit. I was quite engaged for the first few assignments but once I had completed a video, a relevancy discussion, a quiz, etc, I was no longer engaged and I simply wanted to wrap it up rather than continue learning.
    5.In the APUSH, you dive into the entirety of history, including both its darker and brighter aspects. Taking this course is invaluable in gaining a complex understanding of historical events, including those that highlight the more sinister aspects of our past. It sheds light on the evils that often remain obscure in other contexts. However, the vast amount of content covered in the course can sometimes overshadow topics that hold personal significance or spike a genuine interest.

  28. Teddy Abbot

    1.I think the most effective way of learning for me this year was reading and then discussing the reading. This was most effective because I feel like topics are easier to understand not only when you read about them but when you are able to discuss the topics with your classmates and the teacher. The least effective way of learning for me was writing. I still feel it was effective but when compared to the other ways of learning it was just not as effective for me. Although I say this I still feel writing was a good way of learning and helped me understand certain concepts and topics better.

    2.The reconstruction era. I just think I did not grasp the concept enough, which is kind of on me but I was interested in the era and thought learning about how America changed during this time period was interesting and important stuff to know.

    3.I think we spent the most time on the great depression which I feel was important but for how long we spent on it I feel it was not that important and sadly not saying this is why we should have spent less time but there barely any questions on the AP exam about the great depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

    4.I think the strengths were giving students more information on the newer topics that we were not really able to dive in. As a student I feel because of this project I learned more about the decades from 1950 to 2010 and how important those decades were. I think the smartest thing to do with that assignment was to take a lot of quizzes. They were simple and I felt I took the most information away from the articles because I was asked questions about it making me process the article better. The weaknesses I feel were summaries. I feel like they were too long to the point where I had to blabber a little bit to reach the requirement of a page for some article just because there was not as much information.

    5.What I truly learned from APUSH is that America is not the perfect country people here make it out to be. America has a dark past when you really learn its history and what terrible people have run it for terms. Another aspect though is the good things Americans have done to better our country.

  29. Sanuthi W

    1. My favorite way of learning was probably doing the video notes and the powerpoint notes. I was able to write down the information that I thought was important instead of just reading through a lot of information that wasn’t necessary. I also like the documentaries that weren’t just information but were like historical films because I felt they were super engaging. What I didn’t like was the giant pile of handouts because it took up a lot of space and kind of the portraits. I didn’t really feel like I learned much from them and it felt like busy work. I also need to add about talking but this might just be a me thing. If I got distracted for even a few seconds, I wasn’t able to write down the information in time and I’d forget what we were talking about.
    2. I wish we spent more time on more recent events and the post Civil Rights era, especially since we don’t get the opportunity to learn about those events in our other history classes. These eras are more significant for us and it affects our daily lives so much and to talk about them in class would’ve been very informative.
    3. I think that we spent too much time on the Columbus era and on the early colonies. It’s a very important topic that needs to be discussed and it should, however, we spent over 3 weeks on the subject and we didn’t have enough time to learn everything else and it felt very rushed. The information didn’t really feel as crucial since we learn about that same information later in other units.
    4. I enjoyed doing this project because you could choose which assignments you wanted to do and you’re able to have some time in class to do them all. What I disliked about this project was the fact you had to do over 13 of these assignments in order to get a good grade on the project and especially since these months are some of the busiest and most difficult for some people, it didn’t feel entirely fair but I would definitely recommend this project to future APUSHers since you get to learn more about the past few decades or so and it felt informative.
    5. My takeaway from APUSH is that our past destroyed this country and we are still picking up the pieces of what white colonists did to the true people of the U.S and also how horribly controversial our history is.

  30. Jack brunt

    My favorite learning style this year was doing the movies. It was a great way to watch and actually do something other than doing the powerpoint that really helped and changed it up alot. The power point was boring and it was hard to pay attention because it was just like yea your teaching to us not and not having a relevant discussion that would help us learn it it was just like a bland repetitive act and the movies did a great way of mixing it up.

    The descriptions of the wars it was like we just glossed over them and was like yea they happened and than moved on so i think that since america has been in global conflicts for the majority of its career that we should focus on what happened and why they happened and greater details of the effects on american society. And i wish that we did more after 1960ish, it would be better to focus more on that becasue its a large part of the most relevant times in american history to us.

    I wish that we studied the earlier stuff in american history less, not just becasue i did a bad job on those units but also because they didn’t have a relevant form to our current state of the nation and also were like yea this could have happened but we don’t know for sure and it was hard to be really interested in it.

    I think that the strengths of choose your own adventure were definitely the autonomy of it and the fact that we could choose what we were interested in, it was a unique kind of finial and i really liked it apart from the fact that we had to do a considerable more amount of work just to get past a c. it felt unfair that we had to do all of this work just to receive a c if we did it perfect, the fact that we had to do so many extra assignments really hurt the possible fun of this assignment and i think that it really diminished the quality of the work becasue many people i know just jammed it all out in one nite and really needed the a or b to keep there grade up and making so many more assignments to just get passed a c made it very difficult.

    Wow that was hard. I’m glad it’s over but it was a fun experience and we did some cool stuff. The creative ideas were the best but the powerpoints were brutal to go through for so long. Fun overall and definitely enhanced my American history knowledge.

  31. Gillian Erickson

    1. My favorite learning styles in apush this year were talking and videos. I enjoyed these because I feel that I learned the most information in class from them. The talking worked for me because we usually wrote notes about what we talked about, which I would study with later on. I liked watching videos because it seemed like a break from some of the other things we were doing, but at the same time we were still learning new information.

    2. I wished we could have discussed the 2000s more. I would have enjoyed learning about this time period because of the advancements from this era, but also the historical events like presidential elections, hurricane Katrina, the market crash of 2007, and 9/11. Any time period we learned about starting at around the 1940s or 1950s seemed very rushed and I didnt feel like I was learning the material as well and I had to spend extra time at home learning about it. It’s understandable since we had to learn as fast as we could before the AP exam but it still would’ve been nice to learn more about that part of the 1900s and 2000s. Also, the 1920s have always interested me so it would’ve been nice to learn more about that just because of interest. Lastly, I wish we learned how to do all the written questions more.

    3. There are a few topics that I wish we spent less time on. First, is the colonial era. After learning about Columbus at the beginning of the year I felt like we learned about the colonial era for a long time. I don’t know if it’s just me or what but that unit seemed so long. Next, is the civil war and reconstruction era. Around this time in my opinion all these units around this time period seemed to blend together and was just very time consuming in my opinion. This unit also seemed long to me since it was right around the time we started doing LEQ’s.

    4. Some strengths of the choose your adventure projects were that we could learn more about the topics we didn’t get that much time to learn that we were interested in. I personally did a lot of work from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. I liked that there was a variety which made the work less overbearing. Something I didn’t like is that it seemed in my eyes sort of like busy work. Since we worked on it for so long, with other things it seemed like the work was just to fill empty gaps since we still had a month of school left with the exam already done.

    5. I learned a ton in this class. I first obviously learned a ton about American history that I never knew before. And the topics I was familiar with deepened my knowledge. I also learned how to format portions of writing which will help me in later ap classes. Since this was the first ap class I took, it gave me an idea what to expect going into my senior year. I also thing my reading skills and my ability to analyze documents got better which will also immensely help me in years to come. All in all I am glad I took apush and I hope that future students will have a positive experience just like I did.

  32. Ally OBrien

    1.
    My favorite learning style was when we had group discussions where the entire class participated and spoke about a topic. By doing this we really unfold everything and here every side and perspective, this way it really gets drilled in your head. My least favorite learning style was probably watching short videos about specific topics because while they contained important information, I personally had a hard time following them. I found that a lot of the time the videos did not have words on them which for me as a learner, I need.
    2.
    I wish we spent more on period 8 for the AP exam. I know it was my responsibility to study that myself but I learn better when we have the ability to do the note packets and have further assignments on the topic. I felt that the entire period was scarcely in my brain.
    3.
    I found with the grading set up for the AP exam that periods 1 and 2 are not as relevant, even though I felt that we spent a large portion of time on them. I was not bothered by this at the time, I just feel that the part of studying for the AP exam that we were crammed for could be better organized if we spent less time on the first two periods.
    4.
    There were definitely a lot of strengths and weaknesses in this project. The overall project was great, I enjoyed the content we were learning, and the assignments. The project was definitely a test of my procrastination. The way that this project was introduced I found extremely confusing, I think rather than initially introducing how to earn 75%, introduce how to earn 100%. I also was getting contradicting answers on how to earn 100%, it says that 11-15 assignments is on a sliding scale of 88%-100%. When I would ask peers if doing 11 assignments gives you the ability to earn 100% they would say no. This confused me because I feel like that is not exactly clarified on the rubric, or maybe I do not understand what sliding scale means. The CNN videos were a little hard for me to follow because there wasn’t an ability to turn on subtitles but other than that they were fairly entertaining. I love the national geographic articles, just reading them as well as doing quizzes throughout the year and in this project and summaries.
    5.
    My biggest take away from Apush is that America will never be perfect. There has been no perfect president that everyone can agree with. America should try to avoid wars at all costs because mostly negative things come out of them, and winning a war only means some if not many people had to die along the way. I also learned that when you are in a class for this long, learning this much content, it is difficult to not love what you are learning along with the class.

  33. Sebastian Forberg

    My favorite learning style was visually watching like a video on the things we were learning. I liked this because the videos had all of the key points very concise and explained while also being more entertaining than just lectures. My least favorite was by far readings even though I feel we didn’t really have that much assigned. I feel that I cannot focus on history reading for some reason probably because there is no action and it is just information. Videos put this boring information into something fun to learn. Not saying the stuff we learn isn’t intriguing or anything of course.
    I would have wanted to spend more time on wars and the times that we didn’t fully cover in class but did for chose your own adventure. I think wars are the most action and fun to learn about because they usually have heros and important battles. the time after like World War Two we did not cover that well when I think it has very interesting things that are more relevant to us because it is closer to now. I felt that a lot of the things very very early on in our history is kind of irrelevant especially the depth we went into it if it means that we miss out on the newer stuff like after world war two.
    I kind of already answered this in the last question but I’ll use a specific unit of period 3. I really have no idea what was in this unit but the war of 1812 so that’s why I think it is irrelevant. I also remember taking a long time to go through this unit and it didn’t amount to much.
    A strength of choose your own adventure was that we could pick the topics that we learned about. I wanted to learn about the space race and the Vietnam war so I did things on that. I also choose more important and big topics that I would remember better rather than a lot of small pieces of information. A weakness of chose your own adventure was that the assignments were too easy to just not learn the information and rather just get the assignment done.
    I took away so much information on American history becuase of this class everything from the start of our country and every step that led it up to today. I will forever beat my dad in history sections in jeopardy because of APUSH.

  34. AJ J Geissbuhler

    My favorite learning style had to be the slideshows. While they were boring, its the class that made them fun. With people asking questions and Mr. Wickersham chiming in to answer, the banter in the class is fun to listen to. Even if the content is boring, somehow our class found a way to make it funny. And being around friends during that was great, as we could bounce back and forth. In all honesty the only learning style I didn’t like was the group work done with sources. I felt like it was too much awkwardness for the group, at least in my experience.
    From all the content we have covered this year, if we could cover something more, it would be the space race. While I am biased because I love the subject, I think the interesting history of it deserves its own chapter. It fits alongside the cold war, and it could be directly after the second world war, as german scientists helped us to win. But, if it couldn’t be anything that we didn’t cover, I would 100% choose the history of football. While we covered mostly political and militarism advancements, the history of sports in the US deserved their history to be taught too. Especially Football, an American built sport.
    Starting from the colonial age to the 1960’s, the unit we covered too much in my opinion was imperialism in America. While the unit itself was well thought out, I think the extra activities were unnecessary. For example the circle talk, it was a good talk, but all the extra time spent on it could have been spent in the future, like the 1970’s or 80’s.
    I think the biggest weaknesses of Choose your own adventure was the limiting factor of the assignment. When we first were told about it, I imagined each of us doing something that we wanted. Like researching a topic and writing a presentation, or an essay or something along the lines of it. Instead, we were limited to only certain articles and videos, where we had to do assignments about it. I think it could be so much better if you give us the freedom to choose any topic and research ourselves, instead of providing the videos or articles.
    American history is complicated. It’s filled with lies and manipulation, but to learn about our history is important. I believe in the idea that if you learn from a mistake, the chances of it happening again are slim. And that’s American history.

  35. Ashton Denys

    1.This may be an unpopular opinion, but I’d say my favorite learning style for most of the year was taking notes on the presentation. I feel like writing it down as well as watching and listening to you talking about it helped cement it into my mind, even if it wasn’t as flashy or interesting as a video or something. I also appreciated the review book as it was pretty much my bible during the last final weeks leading up to the AP test as well as all the tests. Again, nothing can really compare to spending time with the material. Also towards the end of the year towards the AP test I watched a lot of videos just as I was going about my day just to refresh my memory. I wouldn’t use them for tests/new material though. As for what I didn’t like, the video days where we’d just watch a few videos and take a few notes on them didn’t work too well for me. I get why we did them (to fit in as much as possible) but I’d say I forgot most of the information in a few days.

    2.I don’t know if I’d really want to spend more time going into it for the sake of the AP test, but for me one of the most interesting things we looked at were the ideas and lives of the founders. I read a book over spring break called Fears of a Setting Sun which covered the fears of the founding fathers as they had to step back and watch their country continue on without them and their fears for the future (which created my opinion that James Maddison is my favorite president.) It was really interesting to see how these founders of our nation began to shift their views or lose hope and kind of showed a different side to each of them. Like how we immortalize these men and yet even they were unsure. (The reason Maddison was my favorite was because he never stopped believing that the US could get through its problems and said all that well living to see Andrew Jackson take power)

    3.Maybe I’m misremembering how in depth we went, but I swear that we spent a good amount of time on Andrew Jackson and his presidency, and then I came back to review/study for the AP test thinking that Jackson was a must know thing and defined the era that he was a part of only for there to be like 2 pages dedicated to him in the review book. I mean I understand why we looked into Jackson because of him being the first populist president, indian removal act, spoils system, etc., but I guess to me he just seemed overhyped.

    4.The biggest strength to this project is definitely the choice part. Being able to study what you want just makes the whole thing a little easier and more enjoyable. I would say a weakness would be the emphasis on meeting the goal of 15 things. I think for many people (who in all fairness probably waited a while before really starting to work) it became a grind to finish a few more projects as quickly as possible. Now there’s really nothing you can do about this as if they wanted the good grade they probably should’ve started sooner, but I’d say that what I saw most was people cramming 6 or 7 assignments in like 2 or 3 nights to meet the requirements.

    5. Everything’s going to be okay. I’ve seen worse.

  36. Maggie R Holloway

    1. I think my favorite learning style this year was watching videos. Those documentaries really stuck in my mind, especially the details like stuff about the Vietnam War, including stuff like Agent Orange– which I wouldn’t have remembered if it wasn’t on paper. Although, some slides did help me. I still remember stuff about rebuilding the country after the Great Depression, with stuff like the Glass Steagall Act. My least favorite way was probably on paper and slides, though– it was just very boring to me, and didn’t engage me.
    2. I wish we spent more time in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. For some reason, the information from those time periods kind of skipped my mind, and I couldn’t place names with time periods from that age or dates of events. The political machine thing was a little confusing to me– the general 1900-1920’s were.
    3. I don’t think we had to go as in-depth in the earlier years, like the 1700’s– although the covering of what areas exported and grew was helpful, I feel like we lingered on it for a little too long. It just didn’t feel necessary, especially since we had gone over those things in previous years
    4. I really liked this project! I feel like some of the strengths were the allowance of doing whatever you want, and the freedom of it and letting us work at our own pace, while still feeling the pressure of the deadline. Some of the weaknesses in this project were the fact that we could probably just do a bunch of questions for videos and still get full credit after we go the necessary ones done, which takes a lot less time and effort than writing a summary for an article or another thing, like a quiz. It feels like kind of a loophole.
    5. My takeaway from AP US history is that history repeats itself a lot, and even today, we’re still stuck on these things of the past. The Civil War was fought because of the question of race and inferiority (and a little bit of economy), and today there are still people out there who debate the inferiority of people of color. There are still people in the United States that have the same mindset as people back in the 1800’s, which really shows how little things have progressed, even with the majority being changed. History leaves a lasting impression on the people of modern day, essentially.

  37. Parker

    1.) My favorite learning strategy this year was definitely the videos. During the year, when we used slides and notes, I found it very hard to visualize and generally understand some concepts. However, whenever we watched videos, the whole event was painted very effectively in my head and remained very easy to call back to whether being on our in-class tests or the AP exam. The discussions were my least favorite, I feel that the discussions were always very one-sided, and in most cases, people were too afraid to say something that might offend people. In addition, during these discussions, much of the dialogue felt like people were just trying to earn points, not discuss, I feel that I didn’t learn much of anything from most of these discussions.
    2.) What I wish we had spent more time on was the specifics of the large wars we fought. I know it wasn’t going to be on the AP test, however, I feel that it would have been really fun, and a better subject to make assignments for and study for. I really liked the class, except I know for a fact I would’ve liked it much more with more coverage of battles and other conflicts, along with weapon advancements, and military tactics.
    3.) This year I wish we had covered less of the really early stuff. The start of the year was really slow and all the stuff about Columbus was probably the most forgettable and the early Native Americans I also found really boring. Those topics give the class a bad aura from the start which is unfair since the class ended up being very fun. I just wish we had covered the bare minimum when it came to very early America and jumped into the development of the union itself.
    4.) When it came to choose your own adventure, I feel that it was overall a bit redundant. I was really glad that we were able to learn about the material which we were not able to cover, but with the workload that the project was if you desired full credit, it ended up being more busy work than learning. I didn’t retain much information from the project, for example; I did mostly movies since they were quickest for me, but instead of watching the films and ingesting the material displayed, I found myself fishing through as the video went on for something I could ask a question about. Now to cover some of the positive aspects of this project. To begin with, the articles and their quizzes were a great way to learn about a topic and affirm that knowledge. I only did a single article, however, I remember it very well since I both wrote a summary and took a quiz, that information is now locked in my head because of all the work I did with it. The other strength I want to cover is the nature of the project itself. It really did feel like a closing-the-year-out type of assignment, and it was very relaxing using my class time to complete the project.
    5.)What I’ve taken away from this whole year is that there is a lot of content within each year of history. The fact that America had so much full history really makes me wonder what the rest of the world has to offer, everything is happening for a reason.

  38. Vincent

    1. A lot of our time this year has been spent reading, writing, studying, watching videos, reflecting, and talking about American history. Discuss what your favorite learning style was this year and why it was effective for you. Also, explain which was your least favorite way to learn and explain why it doesn’t work for you.

    My favorite learning style is talking in class with the PowerPoints because there is so much information that can change every class period and it makes learning so much easier and more fun. If we would spend more time on the slides and not have to rush through them I think that many more of us would have liked them. I didn’t like doing stuff on my own because I don’t really do a good enough job because I’m not a history major.

    2. We studied a lot of stuff this year – from the Pilgrims to the Revolution to Andrew Jackson (soon to be leaving the $20, or not) to Abe Lincoln to Alice Paul to the Depression and the Civil Rights Movement. What did you wish we had spent more time on than we did this year and why?

    I wish we spent more time on the most recent stuff because it is more relevant for conversations and for everyday life. Spending more time on political parties could give some insight into why the system is so broken and so we can make informed decisions on which party we might want to vote for when we are 18. Learning more recent stuff would be difficult especially with the AP test but maybe we could learn about it after the AP test if it’s possible.

    3. Yep, we studied a whole lot of stuff this year, but I bet you wish there were some units that were shorter or didn’t go as in depth. What did you wish we had studied less of and explain why (keep in mind that if the info didn’t make it onto the test doesn’t mean it won’t be there next year)?

    I really can’t think of anything that we did that I didn’t like.

    4. Choose Your Own Adventure was a brand new wrinkle that I had introduced this year and never done something like this before. What do you think were some of the strengths and weaknesses of this project? Explain why.

    Some strengths were that we could pretty much choose what grade we got and that made it quite interesting. We could learn about whatever we wanted to between 1940 and 2008 which made it pretty self driven. There were a lot of weaknesses. Starting off is that 15 assignments (in order to get 100%) in addition to about 6 other assignments makes it very stressful on us when a majority want to keep their A that they strived for the whole year. If 5-10 assignments were all we had to do then it would be a lot more manageable because we spend around 4 classes watching movies that we have blogs to do which takes up focusing on the Choose Your Own Adventure. When you first explained it I thought it was going to be that you would present 3-5 topics that we could choose from and then we vote on it and after the voting we would discuss it for one class period and if we had time we would do more than one topic. I was quite disappointed in what it turned out to be because the way I interpreted it sounded really fun because in class discussions are really fun and can turn into something hilarious that can brighten our days.

    5. People talk a lot about takeaways – a summary of an experience, distilled down to one or two sentences. What is your takeaway from APUSH (or in other words, what did you truly learn about American history)?

    I learned that we as a country are really messed up and we need to fix it. The U.S. tries to fix other countries’ problems so we don’t focus on our own problems and when we do the people in charge don’t do much.

  39. miller mann

    ***second submission, the first one was very hard to read.

    My favorite and most effective learning style in APUSH this year would have to be the casual note taking days we had, where you would go over a powerpoint. I seemed to be a bit more engaged those days than anything else. I also really enjoyed discussion days, but I do think they ate up a lot of class time, probably contributing to the way that we weren’t able to finish up all of the content. But I think your teaching style was very good for me, and I was able to retain information quite well. My least favorite in terms of information retention was the videos. I really enjoyed the days we watched videos, but they go too fast and no one can ask questions in the middle. Even though I don’t really speak up at all during class, I learn from other people’s questions a lot.

    I wish we had more time for the cold war and beyond. On the AP exam, I was pretty much winging all of the questions about that as even though I studied them, I didn’t have a clear understanding of the content, which likely resulted in me getting an unsavory grade, but it’s my fault if that’s the case. On a topic that’s not even content based, I think we should’ve had more practice with writing and MCQs so that we understood them better. I did it on my own, but having direct help from a reader would have made it better I think.

    I can’t really think of anything. I wish we studied less. I do remember thinking that we studied the early 1800s for like half the year, but there was so much content that I can’t think of anything to take out. I think everything was well spread out so It’s hard to think of anything that took up too much time or that we went too in depth in.

    To start off, I think the main weakness was the primary source and videos. I did not enjoy either of them, as summarizing a documentary or document is simply not how I learn. I can’t retain much of the information from the videos even if I take notes. There was an interesting aspect of the leniency of this assignment which I liked. I think a huge strength was that if you did 5 assignments it was 75%, that means that it is not a heavy workload, even though I did end up doing 14, I only did it because I felt I needed to, even though I could have succeeded just fine without doing them. This assignment did feel a bit forced in at the end, but that’s not necessarily negative. I do think we could’ve had more class time to work on it, as I didn’t really gain anything from rewatching two movies I had already seen. But If I was you I would definitely assign this again next year, because it allows kids that want the opportunity for quite easy points to get them, but it’s not going to wreck someone’s grade because they didn’t do well on it.

    My takeaway from APUSH this year was that American History is more than incredibly complicated, it can be horrific, and also extremely interesting, I thought that American History was mostly filled with leaders and old white men, and while that is right, it was also filled with so many wonderful people that made this country what it is today.

  40. Sabrina

    1. I think my favorite learning style from this year was probably either watching videos or honestly doing whatever writing stuff we had to do on Schoology. I feel this way because it actually allowed me to dive deeper into specific topics without feeling lost or confused or not taking good enough notes to remember what happened. Like obviously the PowerPoints were our main source of information and learning this school year but because the class is so fast-paced, I really needed that extra stuff to better understand the content and everything about it. Although the portraits and relevancy discussions and stuff were time-consuming, I think they definitely did help in the grand scheme of things. I think my least favorite way to learn was definitely reading because I don’t understand stuff well when I have to just look at something and remember it. That’s why interacting with the concepts by writing portraits and stuff actually helped me more. It’s the same thing with the videos too; since I get to actually see someone doing something while I hear it, there’s a full in-depth explanation of what’s happening, and we usually have those note sheets to do along with them. Rather than just having to look at something and understand it, this other stuff lets me actually get a full grasp of what the concept is.

    2. I wish we had spent more time on the 1880s-1920s. I don’t know why really but all of that stuff just really interested me. Either that or the modern stuff since we obviously didn’t actually cover it. There were a couple of essay prompts on the AP test that involved stuff past what we stuff and that would’ve been good choices and honestly easier than the other ones if I had just had more knowledge on the subject.

    3. I wish we had spent less time on the late 1700s. I feel like the beginning of APUSH took forever and that could’ve been because it’s just a long class that you have to get used to, but I also feel like a lot of time was spent there that could have been spent on other topics. Also, that’s kind of the only part of US history that everyone in our class knows at least something about so I feel like we would have been fine hearing less about it. I also just feel like there are way more interesting things we could have been talking about because colonial stuff is boring.

    4. I think one of the strengths was that it allowed us to look more into whatever we were curious about. Like it wasn’t just boring stuff that was on the APUSH test, but actually, stuff that happened that we might want to learn about. I think another strength was the variety of options. You just had to do one of everything and then from that point, if you wanted to get 100% you could just take 10 more quizzes or something. I think a weakness was the grading system because it was a lot of work to have to do leading up to finals if you wanted to get a good grade on it. Another weakness was the instructions. I was kind of confused about some of the stuff like if something counted or didn’t count or what you meant by certain words. I was also confused with the quizzes and whether or not they had to be retaken and by when and if they would count and just all of that. So overall with more clarity, I think it is a good project just kind of a lot to do leading up to finals.

    5. It was a lot of work and honestly maybe not worth it, but pretty interesting when I wasn’t too tired to think about it.

  41. Sofia Marx

    My favorite learning style before tests was taking notes during lectures because in doing so, I comprehend information better. The main way I studied for tests was by going through the test review terms, and a lot of that information was covered in lectures, so it was significantly easier to study for tests when I had already learned the material through class notes. Most people probably wouldn’t agree with this, but because of how long it takes me to process information, writing it down while listening to it is the equivalent of reading along with an audiobook. My least favorite learning style was going through primary sources/documents and highlighting things. I feel like through this process, I retained nothing, and it wasn’t at all beneficial to me. Again, this is just my perspective, and it may have worked well for others, but for me, it makes it difficult to follow along because I’m significantly more likely to space out when I’m not constantly writing stuff down.

    I wish we had spent more time on the civil rights movement. I’m guessing this is a somewhat universal opinion, and I’m aware that we ran out of time, and had we had more time, we would’ve covered it more extensively, but I think it’s an extremely important part of American history, and it’s significant in understanding why certain things are the way they are today. I don’t think that the lack of time spent on the Civil Rights movement had an impact on AP test scores, but I think it’s more so important in a conceptual way. I also think we should’ve talked about the War on Drugs for the same reason. So many things from that era have had significant impacts on today’s time, and learning about them will cause a greater overall understanding of what America really is. In addition, I wish we spent more time on the details of Indigenous lifestyles. This is a common thread throughout these past two AP tests, and I also think understanding these cultures is an important part of understanding the depth of the colonization of North America. I don’t necessarily think we didn’t spend enough time on this, however because it was early on in the year, not only was it easily forgotten, but it was taught at a point where students were still attempting to figure out their learning styles in an AP class, and because of this, it was likely the least retained information. Maybe spending less time on this during the beginning of the year, then reviewing it towards the end of second trimester or something similar to this could be more beneficial.

    I wish that we had spent less time on the Revolutionary War period. In 8th grade history, a majority of what we covered was during that time period, so I feel as though it’s a little redundant to spend as much time as we did on that time period. It’s definitely an important period, but I feel like we could’ve gone into it with the assumption of some baseline knowledge, rather than the assumption that we were learning completely foreign information. Some of that unit could’ve maybe been skimmed over a bit more.

    The biggest strength of this project was the element of choice. One thing I’m extremely adamant about in the school system given the opportunity is giving students some choice regarding the information they learn. Without this choice, the narrative that a majority of students hate learning and wouldn’t do it if school didn’t force them to would continue. With this project, students were given the opportunity to go more in depth regarding topics that interested them the most. In addition, the element of choice for each assignment was helpful as well. Having the baseline of needing to do one of each adventure type gave students an opportunity to figure out what works best for them, and following these five assignments, we were able to do whichever we preferred which was nice because every student has a different learning style. The main weakness of this learning style is the factor of time combined with the amount of assignments we need to get done for a particular grade. I wouldn’t know how to work around this, but for me personally, maybe having a required or recommended schedule for when a certain amount of adventures should be due would help. This way, instead of quality of assignments decreasing at the end, a majority of students would take this as an opportunity to truly explore a topic that interested them.

    My takeaway from APUSH was that many of today’s challenges in America are a result of actions seen throughout American history. Because of this, these problems are extremely difficult to solve if we don’t explore their roots, so before establishing a course of action to combat a specific problem, we should address why it exists in the first place and work from there.

  42. Sammie Koch

    1. My favorite learning style this year has been through powerpoints. I enjoyed being able to write down whatever information I thought was most important for me to remember and to study. I also liked being able to ask questions about things you said or have things easily explained more in depth which is a little bit harder with videos. My least favorite way to learn in APUSHs was through watching documentaries and filling out questions on them. I personally just do not retain information from answering premade questions. I like being able to take my own style of notes rather than predetermined ones.

    2. I wish I would have learned more about the 1970s and father before the AP test because there ended up being a lot of questions on these and I felt unprepared for them. I also would have liked to learn more about the women’s suffrage movement.

    3. I wish that in this class we spent a little bit less time on Unit one and focused more on recent events as that was more prominent on the AP test this year. We had summer homework on Unit One and then spent a really long time covering it in the Tri and I feel like we could have accomplished a lot more if we shortened that one a little bit.

    4. Personally I really liked Choose Your Own adventure. I love doing individual work where I have some freedom to what I learn about and do. One strength from this project I think was definitely the article summaries and quizzes because I felt Like i retained a lot of really good information and it didn’t take me a ridiculous amount of time to complete them. However, I did not really enjoy the Primary source option as much. The primary source took me a lot of time to complete and I struggled a little bit with it too. I also think that if you did this again in the future, you should definitely create more article quizzes because I was way more inclined to read the articles with quizzes and that I could write an article summary on rather than only being able to do one of the two.

    5. I think In Apush, I learned a lot about how America started from scratch and evolved over the years through different Ideas, leaders, and inventions. APUSH was a hard class for me but I think I learned a lot of valuable information about America that I didn;t know before.

  43. Flynn O'Connor

    1.) My favorite way of learning was the activities or demonstrations we did in class. For example, the Oregon trail game was an incredibly fun and interesting experience that taught me much about the trail. It made me more interested in the whole time period itself. Another example would be your snowball fight analogy. That analogy was very interesting, and it was fun to try and guess who and what you were talking about during it. It was also very educational when watching you do stuff, such as watching you write the DBQ. The main learning strategy I don’t like was the presentations, which just so happened to be the most common way we learned. Most of them were incredibly boring and it was hard to pay attention. Though you do try to slip in comedy to keep us entertained.
    2.) I wish we spent more time on WWI and WWII. I really love learning history, especially wars. I wish we dived deeper into lots more specific battles. Stuff like what equipment was used, what units, generals, kills and deaths, its contribution to the overall war, the specifics. We did do that for some of the really impactful fights such as D-Day, but I would’ve loved to see it for a lot more battles.
    3.) I think a unit we spent a lot of time on was reconstruction. You say it’s possibly the most impactful period of our history, but you can really dumb it down to racists getting into office and blacks getting screwed over. I understand that’s important to see what happened after the civil war. It did lead to the gilded age and industrial revolution, as well as developed our country in interesting ways. But I honestly believe we spent an incredibly large amount of time on how african americans were affected during this period. That’s obviously incredibly important as they just got freed, but still, there’s a lot more to American history than minorities.
    4.) I think this was a very creative and interesting assignment. I liked how open the project was to us, we could do how many of what we wanted, when we want, on whatever we wanted. We had plenty of options on what we wanted to learn about and I really enjoyed that. But that freedom is a double-edged sword, as you know I’m not the most efficient person as I often procrastinate. I think I ended up doing the bare minimum, which was one of every activity. Part of me wants to blame us only having like 5 work days, but I also spent 4 of those on my phone so I can’t complain. I think this was a cool assignment, perhaps maybe a bit too much work for an A, 15 is kinda ridiculous, but it’s APUSH, what are you gonna do about it?
    5.) I learned that America has an incredibly exciting, but also dark past. All Americans have progressed through adversity in many different ways throughout the years our country has breathed.

    Thank you for being such a dedicated and amazing teacher. Despite my lack of effort and my joke presentations, I truly admire you.

  44. Sylvie Ball

    1.I really loved writing, maybe it’s because I’ve always loved writing in general but it gives you the freedom of interpreting things in your own way and getting to put your thoughts on things into your own words. Everything else (reading, documentaries, and studying) all were us learning about history with a filter over it. With writing we could formulate our own opinions and then put them on paper. The writing portion of apush, especially on all the tests, is able to set you up for 2 subjects, mainly English and history tests in the future. My least favorite way to learn was probably documentaries and videos that had the actors talking switching on and off and in between the action scenes from poorly edited and acted out war movies. I hated watching those, I would have rather watched the drunk history because I remembered things more from those, than the long movies that lost my attention after 25 minutes.

    2.I may be biased but I wish we had spent more time on the way that immigrants betteres America, specifically when asian immigrants came over to help in building the trans-conntinental railroad. I would have also loved to see more of a focus on the conspiracies about history of course with explicit information beforehand that they are only conspiracies.

    4.I personally really enjoyed choosing your own adventure final project, it took the weight off of my shoulders because you could get it done at your own pace, it also made finals week a whole lot less stressful. I think a strength of the assignment is the choice but that’s also in my opinion it’s downfall in some ways.I like being able to choose the decades I wanted to actually learn about but I think that some of the activities were much easier than the others. Like the video questions were very easy and you could complete them without having interest in the topic so maybe for the next time make it mandatory to do things in decades and make all of the decades have the 5 assignments if that makes any sense.

    5.
    Henry clay never dies, We’ve had a lot of bad presidents, greed is the center of evil in politics, slavery was a social issue as well as political, all the discriminatory systems in place back then still have effects today, alexander hamilton was just a musical on broadway, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness are only part timers now

  45. Luci Kucab

    Blog #157 – Final Reflection on a Year in APUSH

    1. My favorite way to learn this year was through the slideshows at the beginning of the year but towards the end of the year it felt really fast paced and crammed which was stressful and hard to retain the information presented. I also really enjoyed going over and analyzing the cartoons in front of class because those were interesting and fun to participate in. My least favorite way to learn was watching videos because most of the time they were just talking on the screen and because I didn’t fully understand the content the videos were covering and they were at such a fast pace.

    2. I wish we could have covered the 80’s and above because I felt like having some more knowledge of that content for the AP test would have been very helpful. Also if we have learned this content we could have done something other than choose your own adventure/ have more group discussions, more time on the tournament, etc.

    3. I wish we spent less time on unit one, specifically Columbus because I felt we would have had more time to prioritize in other areas like the new deal or imperialism. I felt like we focused a lot on Columbus but didn’t spend a lot of time on the different regions of the US before colonization.

    4. Overall I liked the Choose Your Own Adventure but I wish we got to choose our adventure a little bit more. I think it would have been super cool if we incorporated all of the aspects like video, the questions and the summary into more of a broad wide scope project like a presentation, website, poster, something along those lines. I think this would have given us a little bit more creative freedom because I felt like most of the time all of the assignments we were doing were very similar whether like the article summary and then the primary sources. Especially next year if you’re able to get through more of the content earlier in the year we won’t have to learn past the 80s on our own and that way kids could already have some previous knowledge of the time period and pick a more specific topic that interests them! Overall though I definitely enjoyed this assignment and it relieved a lot of stress from studying for a big final at the end of the year.

    5. To me the thing I took away most from apush wasn’t even the content but the writing skills that I gained. I did really well on my English exam and just the structure of the leq, saq, and dbq, although I didn’t like them at the time, have helped me learn to develop a better essay in the long run which I really appreciate!

  46. kaii mitchell

    1.)My favorite style was a mix of the movies and powerpoints. The powerpoints were useful because they gave us lists and sometimes cartoons that were actually on the tests, which was good because then you could simply study from them and not feel stressed for not knowing the material. The movies are also immersive and give you a sense of the time period, and help you remember more things. Something I didn’t like, and didn’t work for me, was the review book. I barely touched it all year and it was hard to memorize the contents. I tried it a couple times, but it never really clicked for me personally.

    2.)I wish we learned more about stuff after the 1950’s. I understand it was very rushed because of the exams, but I wish we had learned more about it for the rest instead of the pre-columbian era, and stuff that happened before the colonies were established. I feel like I saw more questions about that than I did about the unit 1 topics. I wish we learned more about the civil rights movement and women’s rights and everything that came after the second world war.

    3.)Like I said, I wish we spent less time on unit 1 and the beginning of unit 2, they were just kind of boring in my opinion. It felt like we spent way too much time on the earlier topics than we did the middle and more recent stuff, but at least this year, there was more stuff about the other units than the beginning, and most of us ended up needing to teach ourselves 50 years of history right before the ap exam. Also I know that it’s important to know, but I wish we also spent less time on the civil war and slavery, because I feel like a lot of what happened are common knowledge things that people will just know.

    4.)I honestly didn’t mind the choose your own adventure stuff, but i wish we had more time to work on it, and that it was the only project after the exam. I feel like the structure of the project was good and i liked how i could just do my own thing with it and it was basically teaching yourself. However I didn’t really like how i had to extra work just to be able to get a good grade, even if i got 100% on everything, that was pretty overwhelming to do some of the time. I mean i still did the 15 regardless, but i wish the extra ones were like extra credit instead.
    5.)America has a problem-Beyoncé. They hate the world essentially and want to be on top so bad that wars and problems that don’t need to exist are now being created. We should’ve just stayed with the British at that point.

  47. Camryn J

    1.I think the learning style that worked the best for me was writing. I found that terms I had to write for the test review terms were the concepts I knew best on the multiple choice, and were the easiest to write about in any SAQs. My least favorite was between videos and reading. I found it really hard to retain information just by reading excerpts or notes. The videos that we watched in class were helpful to understand broader concepts, but weren’t particularly helpful with retaining specifics for upcoming tests.

    2.I really wish we had the chance to dive deeper into the Civil Rights movement. Beyond the major changes in terms of legislation and some of the movement’s leaders, I really wish we could have learned more about black culture in the 60s. Things like changes in fashion and lifestyle would have been very interesting to dive deeper into. I’m not sure how specific the AP curriculum is about the 2000s, but I would have loved to learn more about Obama’s election. I found the 2000s CNN documentary on his campaign really interesting and would have loved to hear more.

    3.Though I think it was really important to discuss the pre Columbian era, I feel like we could have shortened the first three units, simply because it makes up the smallest part of the test. It’s hard to pinpoint the period I wish were shorter, with the knowledge that the AP test changes every year. This isn’t a particular unit, but I think that overall we moved slower in the second tri and that could have put us more behind as well.

    4.I really enjoyed watching the 2000s CNN documentaries. I found it really interesting and was genuinely invested in the storylines of each segment. I think one of the strengths was each student being able to pick which form of adventure they liked most or found easiest to make of the majority of their assignments. One of the weaknesses was just how much was required to receive a grade most students could afford. All of these small assignments in addition to other classes and finals were a lot at times, even within class work time.

    5.Even though we covered lots of material, I really got an understanding of just how young our country is. I also gained lots of insight on current events, now that I understand our detailed history as a nation.

  48. Arianna Shuboni-Ullmann

    1) My favorite learning style over the year has been reading short stories and movies. It made the material feel more personal, as if you are traveling in someone else’s shoes who is from that time period or event. Feeling more personal ties to the material through emotions and imagery helped me think back to the information when I needed it later. My least favorite way to learn was by the book, because the reading was very fact-based and bland. In the long term, I think that the book was very useful, as it had most or all of the material that would be on the exam.

    2) I wish that we had spent more time on the late 1900s, as there was plenty on the test, but most of my studying for that time period was done solo. There was a lot of good study material posted on the website as well. Another thing that would have helped me would have been going over the earlier stuff from the first trimester again before we took the final to freshen up, but that is also something that could be done independently, and was looked over in study sessions before school with Mr. Wickersham, so he also knew that this would be important.

    3) I wish that we had studied less of the pre civil war era, and more of the post-civil war era. I felt like a lot of time was spent talking about what happened before the Civil War, but not as much so during or directly after the war.

    4) I think that some of the strengths of the Choose Your Own Adventure project was the independence of it all. You got to choose what you did when and where. I think that a weakness of the project would be the quantity of assignments that were assigned. This was compensated for by the large amount of time that was given to complete the assignment, but I waited until the last minute, and do not feel that I got the most out of the experience as I could have. I completed thirteen of the fifteen, and feel that I am in a stable place overall with the assignment. It was a lot of fun.

    5) My overall takeaway from the APUSH experience was first and foremost, how to study for an AP exam, how to gauge the workload of an AP course, and getting the feel of the classroom and what an AP exam was like. I am very grateful for this opportunity that I gained, and would not take normal history if I could go back.

  49. Avery Betts

    1. My favorite way of learning was the notes on the printed out powerpoint. It was helpful that I didn’t have to write absolutely everything while also being able to highlight the key thing, make little notes, and add the things that we only talked about in class. I also liked the test review terms because it was interesting to go into depth about one topic and essentially explain it to all my classmates, and it was great to have descriptions of all the important things in one document. I kinda didn’t like the very few assignments where we had to watch or listen to something and take notes for a class discussion, and I guess the class discussions in general. They get off track really easily and they stress me out a little because I have to think really hard about what I plan to say beforehand and by then the discussion has moved on. Not a huge fan. I also didn’t like the relevancy discussions very much to be honest.

    2. This year I think we could have spent more time on pre-colonization America, like with the Native Americans and their cultures and maybe even their interactions with other countries/empires in the early days. We didn’t touch on it much, we kind of skipped Period 1 in fact, but it still comes up rather frequently on the AP exam and even on the first test, which was a lil goofy tbh. It would just be helpful and interesting to learn about.

    3. Andrew Jackson. We talked about him for a long while, maybe a bit too much. We didn’t touch on the other guys who made a lot of bad decisions for nearly as much time, especially near the end and I think that the message could have been shrunk down a little bit to make room for other things. He was still kinda sucky and it’s important to talk about his affects on, well, everything, but just maybe for not as long.

    4. I didn’t like the way it was presented to require 15 total activities when we’re given 5 options (I got confused and had to triple check to make sure I couldn’t just do all 5 for a full score), but I think that was more of a me thing. It seemed like a lot, but we were given plenty of time to do them, and it worked out because once you get into it, the activities go by pretty quickly. I managed to do about 8 in three days. I also liked that it was clear that you didn’t have to do all of them if you felt like you could make do with a lower grade, it kind of took the pressure off in the last couple days where I decided to stick to 14 instead of going for 100%. I also really liked how there was at least one simple thing that I could just do a lot of to fill in for the other activities I needed. However, as someone else pointed out to me, it is a lot to grade in the last few days of school, so I understand you don’t do this again. Overall though, it was pretty alright, I just didn’t like it because it was work, but that’s school for you and it was better than other assignments I’ve had.

    5. Almost everything can be looked at from a different direction. Every good thing has unintended consequences, and every bad thing has people backing it, it all depends on your perspective.

  50. Andrew Robinson

    1. I liked, (surprisingly to myself), doing the homework assignments. They weren’t busy work, they were assignments based on stuff we needed to know, and then were tested on. I also liked learning by asking questions and learning in class, and by taking notes in class. I think my least favorite way of learning was reading, whether that be from the textbooks, or from articles, although I liked the articles as long as they were interesting.

    2. I wish we spent more time on WW2. I realize we had to hurry in order to get everything in intime for the AP test, but I love learning about WW2, and I would’ve liked to have learned more. When I used to read a ton in 5th and 6th grade, I read a ton of WW2 books, and I found it very interesting. I like learning about recent history as well, along with the history of stocks, presidencies, wars, territories (countries), sports, and genocides. I’ve loved learning about wars and important historical events ever since middle school, and I still like it. I liked learning about the causes for the Civil War, and the causes for WW1, because it helped me understand the cause of these wars. I also really liked learning about current events (modern history), and learning about the news from your perspective.

    3. I personally don’t like learning about the colonial era, or anything before the Civil War. It feels almost too old. I thought we spent a ton of time talking about the Revolutionary War. I also didn’t like learning about most of the stuff through 1777-1840s-ish, I just didn’t find it interesting.

    4. I think I didn’t learn much from the choose your own adventure. Being the procrastinator that I am, I did it all in the last week before the due-date, and I was rushing to complete them. I read 5 articles, did 1 summary of an article, 2 relevancy discussions, 2 primary sources, and 1 15-questions. I think that the videos were the weakest ‘adventure’, because they were long videos, and took a lot of time to watch. My favorite was the article quizzes, because I actually learned and remembered all the information on the articles. They weren’t boring articles either, (at least the ones I read). I think the article summary was also not very good, because it feels like the summary of the article is not as good of a choice as the article quizzes.

    5. I learned that there’s a lot more to history than I realized, much, much more. I think that we need to right the wrongs of our past ancestors, and build a better United States; one that didn’t discriminate based on race or gender.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*