#just bc they got a good math teacher who taught calc in a way that made sense

[lunebits]

ap class tips

for those in ap classes who are struggling. also for those who aren't really. whatever.

just as an intro to my qualifications:

i go to a stem high school (will be graduating next sem!) where all the classes are already advanced as is (our ap classes are also taught differently!) i've taken a total of 10 ap classes during my time, and while that isn't as much as others, i'd say i have a pretty good spread of ap classes i took!

general ap class tips

remember that the ultimate goal for you taking this course is to take the exam and get a 4/5 (reach for that 5!). yes, the grade is important, but that score at the end after that exam might save anywhere from $600-$1200+ in college. so focus your energy on that exam once the exams are encroaching!

make friends in your ap classes. trauma bonding is real (/j) so making friends that will help you study or might save you when you accidentally forgot is key.

and while they all say "study a bit every night!" that's hard to do. the rule of thumb here for every class will be in the categorized sections, so don't worry (i gotchu!!)

ap math (calc ab/bc, stat, physics, chem, etc.)

i personally didn't take physics or chem bc i didn't want to, but i did take bc and got a 5 (yes, i'm so proud)!

rule of thumb for studying at home: do your homework everyday and actually take the time to understand what the hell you're doing. understand what the process is behind solving the problem. be able to pull out the variables. practice, practice, practice. also, this is one of those subjects where it's actually worth it to study it at home everyday.

ANOTHER RULE: practice tests. these math exams are about stamina and speed. if you can solve a problem, great! but now here comes 20 more screaming your name. but, if you can get the timing down before your exam, that's even better. so go waste your saturday afternoon at that mock exam if you need to. another saturday will come in time anyway. ask your teacher for mock exams. get that practice workbook. whatever it takes. get the timing in your hand.

just as a quote from my teacher, "life is about choices, and we are all busy people." don't waste your time doing something that'll waste your time. even if you can't remember it, that's okay. just keep moving and score more points somewhere else. and also, do the easy route. only memorize the easy route.

math is about patterns. patterns rule math. extract that pattern out of that problem, memorize it, and you'll be just fine.

FRQS WILL HURT YOUR BRAIN AND THAT'S OKAY! collegeboard has a very specific way it wants you to answer these questions. the best way to learn the format is to do so many frqs your hands hurt. because in any exam that involves math, you genuinely need to do better on the frqs. they'll land you more points. yes, the mcq might get you that 5, but the frqs become the basic 3 or 4 that you need. your teacher will hopefully teach you the format, but if they don't, the collegeboard ap website has all the past frqs they've ever made.

YOU WILL BE OKAY. I PROMISE. make sure that if you cry, you understand your disappointment then move on to a larger action plan.

ap histories/humanities (art history, u.s history, euro, world, etc.)

i've taken all the histories that my school offers (apush, euro, apwh, apah, etc.)

rule of thumb: don't study at home unless there's a test coming up or you're bad at putting stuff in order.

GET YOUR WRITING SKILLS DOWN PAT. this is the thing that'll get you the most points. that mcq section is a killer, but doing 3-6 (looking at you apah exam) right after might just kill you. so please, get your stamina up. just write. just keep writing.

timeline shit for history. because when it comes down to it, knowing the sequence of events and knowing the events themselves are more important than dates or whatever.

if you're worried about coherency in your writing, jot down a small pre-writing list.

memorize every single rubric. luckily, the dbq/leq rubric is the same across apush, apwh, and euro. you'll get away with just memorizing the two. the apah rubric is a little different, and the ap lit rubric is a little different. just memorize them as best you can.

when writing, cater to your reader. make things easy to spot and easy to grade. they'll give you a higher score if they can clearly see where things are.

just practice mcqs. all the stimulus will have something you can pull out of it (unless it's like apah where you're meant to memorize the works). but every question will have an answer that's in the passage. practice finding that answer. (this one is still really hard)

all these tests are tests of stamina. and sometimes, they're on the same goddamn day because collegeboard hates love us. just keep going. grab a snack. rest your eyes, go.

essays are the bane of everyone’s existence in ap courses because you’re on this strict rubric and have this mythical complexity/sophistication point that you need to give your hopes and dreams of achieving. BUT. but. you’ll be okay. especially for exams like the ap lit/apah exam, you get to come in knowing at least a bit of the exam (for ap lit, a good part of the frq weight. for apah, 90% of the test). TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THAT!! know a novel inside and out. know the works inside and out. you’ll be okay. stretch your hands, breathe, write.

ap sciences (bio, physics, chem, psych, econ)

i've personally taken bio and both econs, but these are all concept based, so the same general tips apply.

rule of thumb: if you don't understand it in class, you need to study it at home asap. seriously. because you sure as hell won’t be able to put it together during class the next day. whats good though is that there’s so many resources online (esp videos!!) for all the ap sciences that it’s actually crazy.

read your textbook. science is great with a textbook in your hand. you don't even need to read the whole thing. just skim through it to add information to your class notes. most times that works.

because the questions are concept based, the mcq/frqs are a little hard to get used to. SO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS: don’t ignore your responsibilities and learn what these questions look like.

flashcards. USE FLASHCARDS. so much of science is not only understanding concepts but applying them. to apply them, you need to know them by heart. and to know them by heart means flashcards to drill yourself.

and speaking of applying your knowledge, you need to take things slowly. approach questions with this framework: 1) read the problem + understand what concept it’s asking about. 2) pull out that information from your sexy brain. 3) solve the problem based on what you can remember. to truly understand, include a lot of examples in your notes. AND MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND WHY AND HOW THEY WORK. the why and the how are more important than the what.

misc tips 🌷

burnout is inevitable if you don’t manage your time correctly. there’s people online that can explain how to manage your energy more than me so please go watch them instead lmfao

try your best to stay on your schedule. the more you push your tasks to this arbitrary tomorrow, the more you absolutely won’t do them.

honey, you need to bring a snack and a water bottle to those exams, you get like a 10 minute break that isn’t enough for the mental taxation (without representation) that happens on those exams. they’re brutal.

the classes themselves are not as bad you think. i promise. most of the time, you’ll actually have fun. and it’s really cool to be learning at a college level. so keep at it! the moment you hate something, the moment you begin to stop trying as hard and your grades start slipping. keep finding the next thing to delude yourself into enjoying (/hj).

#ap exams #ap classes #ap euro #ap bio #ap world history #apush me off a cliff #ap us history #ap art history #ap art history my love #i’m serious i loved apah sm #i didn’t take ap physics that’s a problem for later #study tips #ap literature #ap gov

[hua-fei-hua]

not using chinese for a long time then just suddenly using it again is surprisingly interesting. it's been a good while since i've spoken but i can still understand what's being said (unless its in any other dialect cause that just sends everything down the drain, amirite?)

one time i was trying to bring one of my friends to after school math tutoring w/me bc my friends n i knew she’d get that teacher next year since she was gonna take calc, and so she had to call her mom n tell her what was up, but she wasn’t really sure how to explain it bc she herself wasn’t fully sure what was going on, so she handed the phone to me to explain in mandarin and so i just kind of fumbled my way through going “uhhh yes. yes. stay at school. study math. yes.” (which was made a lot harder by the fact that i just cannot hear things through the phone very well ;__;)

and then after the fact my friend hung up and said, “my mom said you sound cute” ASDFHASDFA

most of my friends speak some mix of canto and english with their parents, so they walked into mandarin thinking “pff this is gonna be easy” and then just immediately perished, partly bc as you said, “any other dialect sends everything down the drain” but also bc the teacher was this old senile man that not even the native speakers from china understood what he was rambling on about

also at my summer job last year i was the only counselor who spoke any chinese, which threw me off so hard, so i just ended up hanging out with the international kids all the time. from my experiences, fifth grade boys from china tend to be the worst. they got better when they found out i was chill and, despite appearances, still very culturally chinese. they taught me 混血, which is probably the most useful thing for me bc i don’t look asian lmao. kids from taiwan seemed to be consistently very sweet; they’d always crowd around me and ask where my mom was from and come to me first out of all the other counselors despite having pretty good english understanding -w-

going off to college, i did find a little clique of international girls from china n taiwan, and very very consistently they said i sound very very cute!! wow aww so cute!!! and it seems to be kind of agreed upon that i have a “very cute japanese accent”??? i’m still not sure where that comes from

#asks #speaking of chinese my mom said a few minutes ago my uncle would pay me to edit my little cousins' written english stories #and i'm down but there's a lot of detail to be figured out #also speaking of chinese if you've ever wanted a full name to refer to me as i've basically given myself bai xuehua (白雪花) #bc bai is my chinese last name already and xuehua is a pun on 學化/learning chemistry #aaa the kids would always ask me for my chinese name too and i'd be like 白曉婷~ and there was this one girl #her name was cherry; she'd always march up to me in the morning and be like 'good morning 白曉婷~' #i'm not that good at responding in chinese bc bad teacher means my vocab is pretty stunted #i really really like writing lines tho!! within reason #if you want i can show you my chinese handwriting; it's one of the few things my mom has complimented me on #but yeah i keep 混血 in the bio for people who can read it to kinda know 'ahh she's mixed' #bc you know how like. white kinnies apparently like taking asian names. #and i really like looking at the chinese side of fandom!!! i've been translated into chinese twice now #once for sparklers once for some things last forever #and reading the translators' reviews in chinese vs. in english is a p fun experience #bc they KNOW and can tell english is my first language n assume i'm not on their platforms (they are correct) #but one of them was like 'judging by the speed of the request response i think they're in singapore' #and i was like DYING INSIDE BC I WAS JUST UP REALLY LATE THAT NIGHT #白 is also the surname of the guy who wrote the poem that gave me my ao3/ffnet usernames!!! #coming up w/chinese names are fun #anonymous

[wordnerdworld]

Reading that math post got me thinking about my own history with math....

I did not like math in school. It was my weakest subject. Memorizing times-tables was boring. Flipping fractions upside down for no reason was pointless. I could correctly apply formulas but only in very limited contexts. I can remember retaking tests for the first time in algebra. I struggled on through geometry and trigonometry and got D’s for the first time in AB Calculus (and I think maybe a 2 on the AP exam). I withdrew from Calc BC and was put in Intro Humanities instead.

(Hilariously, my pre-calculus teacher once gave me a certificate for being one of the top-scoring students in his class. It was meant for a classmate who had the same first name. An Asian man unable to distinguish between two similar, brown-haired white girls. I love the irony.)

Because I wasn’t good at math, that’s the reason I wasn’t good in physics and chemistry and biology either, I was told. I shouldn’t try to be a doctor or an astronaut or a builder or a scientist because you have to be good at math to do those things. "Girls just aren’t good at math,” was a message that definitely got passed on to me.

But I knew girls who were very, very good at math, so clearly I was the problem instead. Or maybe they were somehow more masculine? The salutatorian of my graduating class was a girl and the way people--adults and fellow students--tended to masculinize her and deny her femininity was....oddly apparent to me even as as fairly clueless teenager. Apparently a girl good in a masculine subject like math has to be sexless.

In college I had to take a math course and a non-lab science.

I took Elementary Probability and Statistics and...I actually got a B+! And I remember liking the class. The professor was funny, and the worst thing about it was the fact that it was at 8:00am so I was usually half-asleep. But I liked it because...it made sense. At least, it made more sense than calculus ever had. Likely because the professor made it all about gambling. What are the odds of getting these exact cards in poker? Was a question I could wrap my head around.

Rotating shapes around an axis and cutting slices out of them...????(<---literally my recollection of what calc is all about)

And the science course I took was called Great Ideas in Physics, but was better known as “non-math physics” or physics for non-science students. The professor was funny and I remember chatting with him after class one day and he emailed me a problem to solve. Something about calculating the speed of a moon orbiting a planet. I don’t think I ever emailed him back. I didn’t want him to know I couldn’t solve the problem because there was math in it.

I hated math because I was bad at it (especially in comparison to my reading/verbal skills). And I was taught that some people are just innately bad at math. It isn’t “their subject.” Nothing to be done about it. But I’ve slowly come to realize...I’m probably *not* bad at math. There’s no innate reason why I couldn’t have been good at it.

I was just never given a chance to learn it in a way that made sense to me.