I'm going to need a bigger backpack.

Just when you think you've got your routines down, your desk set up, all your studying ready to go...then, boom! AP Chemistry lands in your life.

Worth it? Yes - just take a look at any college's AP credit page, and then think for a minute about just how big a classroom (auditorium?) would have to be to hold the 300-550 students in an intro chem class.

Bigger backpack. More pizza.

AP scores!!

AP English Language   5

AP Psychology   5

And this just goes to prove that you really can be the master of your own fate. I'm the one who was so discouraged after making a C in my English class, but decided to work like crazy anyway outside of class. Is there a lesson here?

Goodbye to all this?

Junior-itis? Or is it just me?

My best friend is a senior, and he - no surprise - has a bad case of senior-itis. He's more than just a little crazy these days, but he's looking at prom and graduation and a summer job and then the rest of his life...

Me, it's just like I woke up in a new world that on one hand feels so much more serious and full of acronyms (ACT, SAT, GPA, ED, EA) while on the other hand is all about just being a kid (OK, a big kid) just a little while longer. Get a few of us together at lunch, and we are one big pile of crazy.

Is it the pressure? Maybe. Or are we just mature enough to know our days as kids are numbered?

AP Test season is upon us.

That is the sound of me sighing. And yawning.

I know, I know. Some of you, like many of my friends, are wall-to-wall AP classes this year, with something like 6 tests facing you in a little over a month's time. But hey, my 2 AP classes are lot, for me. I actually know some people - perfectly nice, bright, mostly normal - who are taking NO AP classes at all, apparently using the GPA strategy which doesn't include that "rigor of study" part I keep seeing on college websites. It was a shock to hear, on some of my spring break college visits, that some colleges don't weight pre-AP or even AP courses - they just look at an unweighted average. Not sure if my no-AP friends have it right, but then I wonder if my all-AP friends have it right either.

But I guess that's why there are so many different kinds of colleges out there, and we just have to find our way to the one that's right for us. Right?

Rubrics, really?

Yes really.

We used to have rubrics on the reverse side of the instructions for special projects or research papers. One side explained in several paragraphs what you were supposed to do. The other side was a form which showed specifically what you had to do to earn a specific number of points. It broke it all down. These were great while they lasted.

I started last year doing what I called check-backs on instructions, where I underlined or highlighted the specifics buried in the instructions for assignments. This year I've starting just making my own rubric, going one step further.

For example, in AP Psych we were assigned to do either a PSA, book or case study explaining one kind of condition. The explanation was several paragraphs, and since I was working with two other people on a team (and I'd carried one of them before on projects teams like this) I decided to convert the long description to a form that we could use to divide up the work, like translating it into what we had to do.

That last part didn't quite work out, but I did actually have them come over to my house and used the form to make sure we had done everything we needed to do. It kept us on track, and when we were done it turned out that ours was the best one.

Plans are great when they work. But first you need a plan.

Decisions you might regret

I am facing a tough choice about next year's classes. I am on track to graduate under Texas' distinguished degree plan, which requires four advanced measures and a third year of the same foreign language.

I am in my second year of French, and I have an amazing teacher. I'd follow her pretty much anywhere, which is just about what I'll have to do next year because French III may only be offered as a Pre-AP class. The problem is that I'm in the regular French classes and since I'm a junior I won't be in high school for French IV, AP or not. French III is supposed to be tough anyway, and PAP French will be that much tougher.

I wish I had started French in my freshman year so that I could take AP French in my senior year. Instead, I pretty much wasted a year in American Sign Language with the kind of teacher that can make you want to run away from a subject (hard to do, but it happens) so here I am, with a great teacher and a language I love but one year short of a goal.

Guess that's one thing college is for.

Big class, tough lesson

My AP English class has 39 people in it. The teacher has 200 AP English students total. She told us at the beginning of the year that she'd never had this many, and what it meant was that she didn't have the time to write comments on our papers. (I know, right?) She said she would try to use examples to explain in general. She also said that there wouldn't be any projects or extra credit or anything but essays and AP multiple choice tests, less to grade for so many students.

What this REALLY means is that this has been an unbelievably tough year, just really hard and frustrating. I took the course because I've always taken Pre-AP English and earned good grades, A's and B's no problem. I also wanted to take the class because I keep hearing how important writing is in college and I wanted to make sure my skills were what they needed to be.

But that's not how it's working out. I feel like I keep making the same mistakes over and over. Actually, I think I really am making the same mistakes over and over.

I don't know if this means I shouldn't have taken AP English this year. My teacher is great, just really really busy. It's hard to get in to see her. I've started working with a tutor, and she's been great too.

Did you know that on a lot of the AP English III multiple choice questions that there are usually two answers that are right, only one is more right than the other?

And did you know that one of the most important things you can do is study vocabulary, literary terms, etc. ? I learned this when I bought an AP exam prep book, and started using the vocabulary lists. Amazing.

Also, do yourself a favor and search for the websites that other AP teachers create across the country for their students. Some of them are making awesome use of the internet for homework essays. I found several that had students take turns writing essays then critiquing and re-writing after the teacher added some comments, all viewable to the whole class. That was their homework, all online.

What I do know is that it's going to be my grade, my transcript, my GPA - and that's the reality. It's made me think a lot about college, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in huge classes with a couple hundred people. I'm not sure about a lot of things, but I'm pretty sure about that.

What are you proud of?

I was asked recently if there was something I was especially proud of, and I was kind of surprised by the question, because it really was focused on school accomplishments. My answer was a little bit surprising too.

I am most proud of how many projects my teachers have asked to keep so they could be used as examples for future classes. It isn't just the grades, although of course getting the highest grade on a special project is pretty great too. My pride comes from creating something so good that it was considered the best example to show others about how to do the assignment, setting a standard to aim for.

The other day I saw my Silk Road scrolls on the wall in the AP World History classroom, and I hear that the video of the one-act play about two young traders making their fortune on the Silk Road was shown to this year's classes. Down the hall is the Catch 22 billboard and the Greek Isles brochure. The champion purple and white mousetrap car is on display in the lab. Across campus is a book explaining the parts of the brain for my AP Psych class, and over in the theater department there's an exact scale model of a furnished medieval castle great room. Across town at my old middle school is the periodic table I made using flavors and colors of jelly beans, and a book explaining Newton's laws with original cartoons. All were kept for examples of best of the best.

There are fewer and fewer projects every year, and I miss them. They were fun and I worked hard on them, but it's nice to leave a kind of standard for the kids who come after me.

Besides, I'm too old to have them on display at home. I am, right?

Elapsed versus remaining time

Here's something to do on a slow Saturday. It really opened my eyes as I'm trying to prepare for timed tests like the ACT and AP exams.

Here in Texas we've been taking TAKS tests since the third grade, but those are untimed in the sense that you can take as long as you need. Tests in courses are pretty much set to a length the teacher knows can be completed. So even though I've never had much of what they call test anxiety, I've been worrying about the timed tests after the practice SAT test I took a few months ago.

So I decided to try to get a better feel for how much time was left to finish. To do this, I started with my iPhone, and just kept checking it, but this was a distraction as I worked to finish a section of a practice test. Then I bought a little timer that show the remaining time, just a two-color clock face that shows the ever shrinking amount of time remaining. That way I could just glance up and judge whether to speed up some.

Different way to look at it, and it helped with the worrying.

Here's one version but check your smart phone first to see if you can set it up that way, or try the app store.