Winter is Coming

AP season is coming up, something I definitely didn’t need to tell you. Shockingly, AP season is more exciting a season to cover than ping-pong season and golf season combined. It means that Whole Foods is about to have a spike in non-paying customers who sit upstairs for several hours to days, that the Stuy tears-per-student ratio is about to rise dramatically, and that for the first time in hundreds of years, freshmen will have an actual reason to complain.

According to my extensive research, there are three sections of freshman AP Bio. If you multiply this by about 30, carry the one and the seven, you’ll get that there are about 90 freshman children scuttling around the school taking Advanced Placement Biology, which, based on my calculations, is exactly 90 too many.

Even though some parts of AP season have changed, other things remain completely the same. The upperclassmen buckle down and get ready to spend every weekend indoors, shades drawn, hunched over our Barron’s books like little ogres. It is important to remember, however, that, thank goodness for us, we can pick up a voucher at the scanners to support Key Club when we go to Barnes & Nobles to buy more books.

Sitting down to study APUSH, which has so much less to do with Hamilton the musical than we thought, it is impossible not to note that this, too, is a Great Depression. There’s the same utter lack of hope, the same deeply ingrained, internalized self-loathing we all share, the desire to get up and head north.

When we study for the CS test, we’ll wish that a random number generator would just decide our grades, because it would give us a better chance of doing well than we already have. Besides, at this point we still don’t know how to write a random number generator. This is also the time of year when we realize that each of the Five Steps to a Five has 25 substeps, each of which also have 35 smaller substeps.

The juniors will sit in their English classes wishing their teachers had gone over the AP curriculum just once, while anyone with Nieves will wish he had done it only once, instead of a thousand times.

Some of us will end up only taking one AP at Stuy, while others will take more APs than I have fingers. At the end of the day, we can also appreciate that we forked over literally hundreds of dollars to make this beautiful journey possible. Inspirational.