AP Euro? Just Chillax Dawg

  Ignore what anyone has told you about this class, unless they said the same thing as I am about to.  This class is not as hard as everyone says it is.  For people who need to get 100's in every class, it will be hard.  But for people just trying to get a good grade and get ready for the exam, its really not that hard.  The tips I would give you would be do ALL of the non-quiz/test assignments (they'll be consistently referred to as "cushion grades").  The cushion grades help keep your average high despite your low reading check scores.  I know what you're thinking "Oh "i'm really smart, I'm not gonna get low scores on my reading checks"  This might be true for the first few but just wait.  Thirty pages of reading is a lot easier on September 15 than it is on March 15.  However, you are in luck because you can use your notes on the reading checks and I have personally created an outline that will guarantee you a 65 on every reading check (before corrections).  The sections of reading are in chapters, on the first page of the chapter there is a timeline with all of the important events highlighted in the chapter,copy the entire thing down with the dates into your notes.  The flip through the chapter and copy down all of the bold vocab words and write there definitions which are listed in the margin.  Usually, many things  in the timeline are defined in the timeline, but if not define the things in the timeline that you may be confused about.  This will never take more than 25 mins and you will have less correcting to do.

  I can admit that I tend to see the narcissistic side of things so before I get to the things of substance I did not always enjoy about Euro out of the way, I'm going to quickly list the petty things that I would always dislike.  The classroom is way too hot, the computers we use are slow and have horrible interface, and I hate chalkboards.  You don't have to worry about that, cause that's just me being petty.  In actuality, there weren't many things I truly disliked about this class.  If I had to pick one it would be, honestly I liked everything about this class, so I probably hated the classroom temperature the most.

 To improve AP Euro, the first thing I would do is restructure the review for the exam.  I felt like the weeks leading up to the exam were strictly concentrated on content, with little to no focus on writing skills.  I don't know anything about lesson planning so you can take this with a grain of salt, I think it would have better if we reinforced a content review with not only MCQ's, but with SAQ's and LEQ's.

  AP Euro was an awesome class, especially if you really love history.  In its simplest form, it was a good way to challenge myself, learn more about the world, and it looks good for college.  What I liked about this class is that you got out what you put into it, but what you put in wasn't always a stressful, nervous breakdown-worthy amount of work that people will tell you about.  Mrs. Salisbury did a great job of not making every assignment a lecture with note-taking, in fact the large majority of out in class work revolved around collaborative activities designed to help us understand the topics in a more cohesive, group oriented way.  An extremely important part of understanding history is reading primary and secondary documents, analyzing them and drawing conclusions to the time period in question.  This class provides you with the tools to do this ti any historical source, not only are your comprehensive reading skills improved upon but your ability to make connections across historical periods increases tenfold.