At the end of last year, freshman year, all of my classmates and I were given a paper in the which we could pick the classes we wanted to be in for the upcoming year. I, as the overachiever I am, picked all AP. 10th graders are only allowed to pick 1 AP class, which is AP World History. Yet, in the paper that was given to me, by mistake maybe, the choice of AP Chemistry was offered.
Obviously at the time, I didn't actually think they would place me In that class. On my first day as a sophomore, I received my schedule. When I looked at it I noticed, "AP Chemistry" assigned as my last period class. I was excited because I had been given the opportunity to prove my potential to my teachers. The first class went well, the Teacher introduced himself as Mr. Benli, went over the syllabus, the rules and consequences and that was that. I had the class again on Friday, when the first day of school and the first time I had the class was on Wednesday. That's how my school works, you have 8 classes total, yet you take 4 one day and the next 4 the next day. Mondays are different, you have all 8 classes. When on a regular day a block period or one class is 90 minutes, on Mondays each class is only 45. Not that this is important, but since I'm going into detail here, lunch is only 20 minutes, and we get 5 minutes in between each class to gather our things from our lockers to move on to our next class.
Friday was a little less exciting, we started to actually work. I looked down at the worksheet Mr. Benli had given us, understanding absolutely nothing. How would I have? I had never even taken regular chemistry. I looked down at the numbers, confused as to why I had never seen anything like it before. Yet, I was determined. I was going to be the best. I went home and watched YouTube videos, completed practice exercises, and attended after school tutoring clubs. This on top of having to complete the work for the rest of my classes, including AP World History, in which we had a quiz every 2 classes and we had to read a whole chapter and take notes all by ourselves.
I was completely overwhelmed. By the 6th week of school, I was completely exhausted from having tried everything I could and still having no clue what the things on the worksheets my teacher gave us, said. My grade in the class was a 55. On the 6th week of school!! I only had 3 more weeks to fix it, and things were not getting any better. I could not afford to mess up my GPA that bad; so I decided to drop. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to chose. I felt like a complete failure. As if from that moment on, everyone looked down on me. Having to recuperate 6 weeks worth of work on regular chemistry, I got to work.
My teacher, Mr. Benli who was the same from my former class, assigned me a PBL Level 2 that was easy for me to complete and understand; "Old Glory". I enjoyed working and completing this project, it was fun, easy, and I got what I needed from it. I had to do this project twice, since the first time I was so into it, I had forgotten to take pictures and a video. Yet, I got it done. I'm happy with my project, what i learned, and my decisions.