Personal Narrative: Why AP Students Carry

The third week in August, when the wind whispers and the sky turns a greyish orange, is when the AP students, like all students, get the first inkling of what the next year of their life will entail. Syllabuses, textbooks, reading assignments, homework—completely overwhelming if you think about it all at once. Of course, it is impossible to predict what a school year will look like based on the just the first week, but that won’t stop students from guessing. For if AP students carry but one thing, it is curiosity. So they do map it out: take the first week and multiple it by 9, that’s one quarter. Not too hard. Take that and multiply it by two. After all, we all just bought a new TI-84 PLUS graphing calculator. Finally, take that number and multiply it again by 2, totalling 36 weeks of rigorous, standardized education. It’s more digestible when you write it all down like that, right?

How I have to carry a different binder for every class, how one of them I physically have to carry in my arms because it’s too big to fit in my backpack. But I won’t because that’s not in the spirit of an AP student. AP students carry responsibility. They carry the expectations of parents, peers, teachers. Tangentially, and quite fortunately, they carry the potential to meet those expectations. In that way, it’s not fair for me to complain that my AP Art History Binder weighs 300 pounds and leaves my hands calloused and bleeding, that I have to carry it 10 miles back and forth every day, uphill, both ways. So I won’t complain. After all I chose to take these