Really nice perspective. The line that really stood out to me was:
A lot of truth in that.In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual interest. The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.
Perhaps I am just an outlier, but out of the 9 AP classes I've taken, only one was intellectually stifling. Intellectual curiosity was far higher in them than in any regular class I ever took. The demand to keep pace up to learn enough material for the test wasn't strangling us to death, but simply made sure that we weren't wasting too much time. We spent a lot of time in each class doing creative exploration of topics and many fun projects and whatnot. Most of the time we were learning a lot and loving what we were learning. It was only in the two or three weeks before the AP exams that we cracked down and began focusing strictly on problems we would encounter on the AP test. Compared to the non-AP classes, we learned far more, did far more, and were more free to learn how we wanted to and do projects that we wanted to.
The AP classes I've taken have definitely been better experiences than regular classes. However, in some of the classes I took, there was little time for branching out because the teacher was forced to squeeze in some new material that had to be covered for the AP test. But there certainly is a lot of educational merit to those classes.
If anything, I definitely agree with the fact that AP courses were nowhere near as difficult as their college counterparts. As an engineering student, taking math and physics courses in high school was a pushover compared to taking them in college. Not only are they more difficult, but they cover much more material than they do in high school.