AP Parent and Student Support
Dear Parents of AP Students,
As the teachers of the Advanced Placement classes for SAISD, we want to thank you for supporting your students in their education! We are so glad to have an opportunity to have them in our classes this year. We wanted to give you some information so that we can work together to help prepare your student for the upcoming year. Most AP classes are the equivalent of at least a freshman level class in college and as such can be very challenging. Please understand that we want every student in this class to have success. Success may mean several different things: (1) earning a good grade (2) doing well on the AP exam and earning college credit (3) learning study skills and coping skills for their upcoming college career. Ideally, we would like for all students to succeed at all three of these goals.
As AP teachers, we think the most important goal for all students is to learn how to be prepared for their first year of college. Given enough encouragement and positive support, most of our students are successful at learning academic, time management, and other skills necessary for college. Lots of students who do not score well on the exam will come back to visit with us after their first year of college and tell us how much easier it was for them because of the skills they learned in their AP classes while attending high school in SAISD.
We think it is important for you to know that students will probably get to a point sometime during their year when they feel overwhelmed. This is a perfectly normal reaction to a new situation that is academically challenging, and we want to help them learn how to work through these times. For most students, giving up or dropping the course seems like the easiest solution, but it is usually not in their best interest in the long run. If your student is getting to a point where they seem too frustrated, please encourage them to visit with their teacher. We will help them to find a way to work through their anxiety. For most students, learning how to work through these problems while in high school is much easier and cheaper than learning the same lessons when they get to college and are on their own. All of the AP teachers are passionate about the courses that they teach and want to be a part of helping these students go on to be successful college students!
Sincerely,
SAISD Advanced Placement Teachers