With a wide variety of class options, student success is probable, and the Terra Linda High School staff has shown they take this ideology to heart. Just this year, AP World History and AP Psychology have been added to the school’s course list. While AP World is only available for sophomores, AP Psych is open to all. The two advanced placement classes have appealed to many students, both for the class content as well as the opportunity to raise their GPAs and earn college credit. Sylvia Collins, AP World student, comments, “I love history, but the main reason why I took the class was for a GPA boost.” Many students have the same idea. Offering more AP classes provides students with great opportunities to prepare for college and take initiative in their education, specifically for a career path one may want to pursue.”You should choose an AP course based on the subjects you’re passionate about and the classes you do well in,” advises the college board. Currently, there are 18 APs offered at TL.
Students and staff alike have shown great excitement about the new additions to TL’s course catalog, but these classes don’t just appear. There is a process that staff must go through to add an AP course to the schedule. The administration is solely capable of adding new classes to Terra Linda. However, a class must have a teacher, and fortunately, Terra Linda has many who offered to assist. “I’ve taught history at Terra Linda for several years,” Social Science teacher Tyler Blake explains, “and Eurasian history has always intrigued me so I was pretty excited to get an opportunity to teach AP World at TL.”
To prepare for teaching a new course at Terra Linda, Blake took an in-depth summer class and assisted in the course creation itself by helping pick out the textbook and more.
Another blossoming course, AP Psychology, is taught by Emily Fry, TL English teacher and college psychology major. She has been very excited about the addition of this class, which dives into human behavior and why people interact the way they do. According to Fry, the class has been going great, and was set into motion smoothly. “There’s been a movement to make AP classes more accessible to students,” she shares, “and that’s really the main part of the process.”
Terra Linda High School Principal Kathy Dunlap adds, “To bring an AP Class to Terra Linda, it must first be written by the college board, if new. Some classes, like AP Psychology, were written years ago.” Dunlap is hoping to bring AP Psychology to Terra Linda.
She continues,” There’s a curriculum council in the high school district that reviews courses, and concerning AP classes most of them are approved without discussion. Really, the main purpose of the curriculum council is to ask, does this class make sense for our high school?” In most cases, the answer is a resounding “yes”, and moving forward the class can be added to the master schedule.
More of the recent Advanced Placement classes have become more accessible to students, one example being AP World, which was free to any sophomores to take. Both Dunlap and Fry expressed this.
While their sentiment is shared by many, AP World History teacher Dallas Hartwell offers an alternate point of view on advanced placement classes.. “Whether or not we should have AP Classes is a controversial topic,” he states. There is a lot of discussion on if Advanced Placement classes should even be offered at TL.
Hartwell himself is extremely fond of AP World and adds that it is great preparation for AP United States History, more commonly known as APUSH. Though here, he focuses on exposure. Hartwell’s point of view is that without AP Classes, advanced students and non advanced students are placed in the same classes, and academic students are then able to encourage non focused students to do better in school, both through collaboration and their greater interest in subjects.
“AP classes isolate higher level students from less motivated and interested students, who wouldn’t take such classes without inspiration,” explains Hartwell. This perspective has led to hesitancy on bringing more AP’s to Terra Linda. The ongoing debate has not yet concluded. Sophomore Kira Martin shares some positivity. “I love Hartwell’s class so far, and I’m glad that AP World is offered at TL.”
With that in mind, the new Advanced Placement classes at Terra Linda High School, while faced with controversy on their value, have appeared to be successful so far this school year.
