This week we were assigned to write a letter to future AP Psychology students on a variety of things that reveal our thoughts and reactions to this class. Here goes nothing...
Hey AP Psychology student, welcome to one of the more wilder rides of your life!
This journey consists of a full-length college course crammed into a semester of high school life and will test your perseverance and study skills to the very brink. Not only do you have to study thousands of vocabulary terms, but you also need to know how to apply them and use them in a variety of different scenarios, involving even more than just straight memorization. Ms. Halfen will impress you on the first day with her bubbly personality and pure enthusiasm for the topic, and that will carry throughout the semester and will be one of the things you look forward to in a class that should be relatively monotone due to the constant vocabulary assignments.
The class is a myriad of ups and downs. Watching crazy videos about things like meth, sexual tendencies for balloons, or even Brain Games will pique all of your interests and give you good entertainment value, but not too much application value of the topics learned in the class. Sure, these videos may be fun to watch and illustrate a few things we've learned, but the bulk of the material in the class is to be done with vocab assignments at home and self-studying the gargantuan amount of words assigned every few weeks. These vocab assignments will culminate in a 50-60 question test in a few weeks that will surely be a struggle if you don't know the terms. Studying for these tests are surely one of the most dreaded but rewarding things I've had to do in my high school career. Hearing that Psychology was a "blow-off" class from some of my older friends turned out to be TOTALLY FALSE because I had to put in more time in studying before tests for Psychology than I put in studying for APUSH. Maybe this is caused by my actual interest in the topic but I realized that putting that time into doing something you're interested in makes it all pay off at the end (I got A's on every single test this year).
And the biggest thing, PLEASE DO YOUR VOCAB! Don't be like me and start the vocab a few days prior to the test. Do them like Ms. Halfen recommends and follow the assignment schedule (letting the spacing effect do its thing). She will show you a slideshow at the beginning showing statistics about the impacts that doing your vocab have on your test grades, and they are not false. Not doing your vocab will actually result in a fat 50 or a fat 60 in your gradebook... not fun.
Some of the things I've enjoyed this year are the regularly scheduled short clips that Ms. Halfen puts in her lectures because they actually let you escape the monotony of doing slides and watch something applicable to the topic. However, the video worksheets that she makes us do are, in my opinion, applied a bit wrongly. Sure, these period-long videos are super interesting, but the worksheet accompanied can be easily misconstrued as "busy-work" and haven't gained the best reputation among all the students. An easy fix to this problem would be to decrease the amount of video + worksheet days and increase the number of lecture days. Ms. Halfen's lectures are actually educational and are more useful than the countless videos at preparing you for the AP test that you should take.
OK young grasshopper, it's your time to either take this advice of leave it. Regardless of what you do, AP Psychology will be AN EXPERIENCE that will either change your high school life for the better or for worse.
Sincerely,
Ryan
Hey AP Psychology student, welcome to one of the more wilder rides of your life!
This journey consists of a full-length college course crammed into a semester of high school life and will test your perseverance and study skills to the very brink. Not only do you have to study thousands of vocabulary terms, but you also need to know how to apply them and use them in a variety of different scenarios, involving even more than just straight memorization. Ms. Halfen will impress you on the first day with her bubbly personality and pure enthusiasm for the topic, and that will carry throughout the semester and will be one of the things you look forward to in a class that should be relatively monotone due to the constant vocabulary assignments.
The class is a myriad of ups and downs. Watching crazy videos about things like meth, sexual tendencies for balloons, or even Brain Games will pique all of your interests and give you good entertainment value, but not too much application value of the topics learned in the class. Sure, these videos may be fun to watch and illustrate a few things we've learned, but the bulk of the material in the class is to be done with vocab assignments at home and self-studying the gargantuan amount of words assigned every few weeks. These vocab assignments will culminate in a 50-60 question test in a few weeks that will surely be a struggle if you don't know the terms. Studying for these tests are surely one of the most dreaded but rewarding things I've had to do in my high school career. Hearing that Psychology was a "blow-off" class from some of my older friends turned out to be TOTALLY FALSE because I had to put in more time in studying before tests for Psychology than I put in studying for APUSH. Maybe this is caused by my actual interest in the topic but I realized that putting that time into doing something you're interested in makes it all pay off at the end (I got A's on every single test this year).
And the biggest thing, PLEASE DO YOUR VOCAB! Don't be like me and start the vocab a few days prior to the test. Do them like Ms. Halfen recommends and follow the assignment schedule (letting the spacing effect do its thing). She will show you a slideshow at the beginning showing statistics about the impacts that doing your vocab have on your test grades, and they are not false. Not doing your vocab will actually result in a fat 50 or a fat 60 in your gradebook... not fun.
Some of the things I've enjoyed this year are the regularly scheduled short clips that Ms. Halfen puts in her lectures because they actually let you escape the monotony of doing slides and watch something applicable to the topic. However, the video worksheets that she makes us do are, in my opinion, applied a bit wrongly. Sure, these period-long videos are super interesting, but the worksheet accompanied can be easily misconstrued as "busy-work" and haven't gained the best reputation among all the students. An easy fix to this problem would be to decrease the amount of video + worksheet days and increase the number of lecture days. Ms. Halfen's lectures are actually educational and are more useful than the countless videos at preparing you for the AP test that you should take.
OK young grasshopper, it's your time to either take this advice of leave it. Regardless of what you do, AP Psychology will be AN EXPERIENCE that will either change your high school life for the better or for worse.
Sincerely,
Ryan
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