In my sophomore year, the most common class that was mentioned was AP World History. Considering this is a mandatory AP class and the first students take, there is bound to be a learning curve due to the differing course structure. Students informed me that their hardest class was AP world, not because of the structure of the class as they say, “ The class is well thought out and the chapters and readings are well structured”. The problem area arises, in the way an AP class expects students to write and contextualize. AP courses are known to be more challenging for students as they expect a higher level of thinking. An example of this can be seen in another student's words, “ When it comes to the material you are consuming, it is expected that you remember and understand it right away. As well as being able to connect ideas to documents with no sources. It can be very challenging at first.” Another surprise in this course came in the way the tests are formulated, as the multiple choice questions are not similar to what students are used to. As a student restated,“ The multiple choice is based more on how well you can understand the documents presented to you, and how well you can connect it to bigger ideas. All the other tests I’ve been presented with have been reliant on facts or details of the course homework or the lessons. While this is more on how well you can use a new piece of information loosely based on patterns you see in the past lessons.” Which can be a challenging switch for students. 

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 Another common choice for the most challenging class was AP Biology, and this falls more into the struggles of taking AP courses in 10th grade. As they say, it’s a very interesting course, with a lot of information to understand, so it can be hard to fully understand concepts within the given time in class. Many students go to review the information after school, or during 4th period lunch, with this additional help, the sophomores taking this class can do better with information retention. According to a Student, “ I have to go to many of the meetings, to really understand the information, as well as a lot of studying for the tests. The class itself is fine and is taught well, it just seems to me that it’s a lot of commitment and time that you have to sacrifice to understand the material.” There are not a lot of sophomores taking AP Bio currently, so with the introduction of AP courses this year, and some students taking 2, they may need more time to study and may struggle with time management. 

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 Lastly, Algebra 2 was mentioned as another hard class, where students seem to struggle under the workload. For these students, there are often exit tickets and Delta Math on top of the lesson homework. This does provide more for students to practice skills in class but the workload can become overwhelming at times when paired with other classes. As a student says, “Whenever I need a review on a particular lesson, I can use the EmathInstruction videos, which go over the lessons.” The class can be challenging with the equations and long units, which can be a lot to study for. In the end, this class is just a struggle at some points due to the concepts and the combined workload.