Ok, well if there IS a secret society, it isn’t hurting my kid any since he’s 3rd in his class 
But I really think on the whole our school sounds way more chill than any described here and chill isn’t typically an adjective assigned to an IB school.
I think I just uncovered a secret society here, coincidentally. So far, it hasn’t affected my kids that I know of.
Most classes meet 90 minutes every other day on a block schedule. So, one week the class will meet 3 times and the following week 2 times. AP lab sciences, however, meet 90 minutes every day, for a total of 7.5 hours a week. 5 of those periods in the last 2 weeks were spent doing labs.
@fretful: Oh, you mean “here,” as in where you live. I thought that was a playful dig on all of us “here,” at CC. (Well, I hoped it was playful, anyway.)
@Waiting2exhale - LOL! I mean “here” as in my DS20’s classmates where he goes to school. Maybe there is a secret society on CC, but playful though I may be, I’ve not yet found it. 
p.s. Apparently there are classmates of DS20 who have been rushing through lots of outside work ahead of next year starting HS. It sounds unpleasant to me.
Our AP lab classes don’t get extra time. They do the labs during the slightly less than 90 minute class. Which means they have a lot less instructional time to do the book learning. It does sound like your school requires more work for the lab portion. On the other hand, while your kids are in those lab classes, our kids are in an entirely different class, which also comes with homework.
To clarify my post above, our district has a 9 period day with a full period for lunch. Kids must take lunch with the exception of kids that are in the special music ensembles (and maybe art??) who, supposedly, get to eat in those classes. I agree that a kid should not be forced to drop a non-academic elective to be forced into a free period. I was wrong on that point. In our state kids are required to take gym, so students can only take 7 academic classes. If they have no lunch to take special music, they have to be in another music class so that would drop them to 6 academics. A kid would not be allowed to take an academic class instead of lunch (although there may be very few and far between exceptions but I don’t know of any).
In our district many classes are offered as honors, as kids are limited in the number of APs they can take and we don’t offer all of them (no world history or human geography or Chinese, only one kind of AP physics etc). If there is no AP level, honors is offered instead. For the most part, kids are not forced into college prep classes as juniors or seniors (except for state mandated classes), and can be in honors or AP.
We also have Calc at the AB OR the BC level. Kids do not take BC after AB. (at one point this was the solution to the GT kids taking Calc as juniors, but an advanced math class was added when it was pointed out that the non-GT kids were able to go from pre-calc to BC). Also, can only take one AP English class (lit or lang, not both). The HS also requires kids to take the honors science class before the AP version. Thus, most kids are limited in the number of APs they can fit in their schedules. Honors is limited to math and language in 9th grade.
In a nearby district, kids in the accelerated program start APs in 9th grade. They take AP lang and AP lit as juniors and seniors. Our college placement results are “better” than theirs if by better one means that more kids get into top ranked colleges, even though we limit the number of APs and honors classes allowed. Our HS weights honors or AP the same, with 0.5 weight while neighboring weighs at 1, so our kids have lower weighted GPAs, but since colleges recalculate it doesn’t really matter.
By taking these measures, our district has tried to keep the pressure down to some extent. I have heard of kids taking academics through CTY or other programs to skip a math class, but not to repeat it at the HS for a better grade. I have heard of kids starting SAT prep in 9th grade. But I have not heard of kids being tutored to do better on the algebra placement test in the early grades. There are still complaints of too much work. One teacher in particular has a style that keeps the other teachers in that subject well compensated as tutors (the teacher in question reportedly is useless at answering questions kids have).
My point above is that it is possible to ramp down the pressure to some extent, but still provide a good academic environment. I see the “creeping” going on here as well. For example, my older kids had K classes that were virtualy all play. But by the time my youngest (HS class of 2015) got to K, there was more explicit teaching in the area of reading and reading readiness. Definitely pressure from families and from other district. I worry that districts that strive to manage student pressure will be pushed to allow ever more academic pressure if parents start to push for even more.
AP classes have the same time as regular classes, with labs in a double period. AP chem has lab the last period of the day as those labs go into the after-school hours. Kids can leave early, however, during their sports season for games (not supposed to for practice). Most of the time they finished the lab reports in lab, so that meant less time at home.
I’ll be honest. Sometimes I feel like my D, DH and I are living in some alternate universe with a different reality than that experienced by most other people. Sometimes I wonder if we’re just a lot dumber than I had thought, and everyone else is so much smarter. But there is far too much evidence to refute those suspicions, including now the testimony of the science supervisor (used to work at a plasma physics lab) about her own child’s experience in a nearby district. She called his AP Chem class “a blood bath.”
This thread has been an eye opener!!
If we’re collecting data…our school has lab periods in the evening every week. AP Bio and AP Chem have 50 min classes everyday and then a 3 hour lab period at night. They get a yearly credit of 1.5 for the whole class…
Yes. When I went to high school, AP calculus BC and AP chemistry were nothing like what you describe in terms of workload or hidden prerequisites, but students completed them and did well on the AP tests. Seems like your high school is just increasing both the workload and the stress without really helping the students to learn more.
Same at my high school. I took AP’s, there was sometimes a lot of work and the occasional very late night for an English paper, but nothing like what my kids have had to do. And I know I scored a 5 on the one AP test I took! What I remember about AP Bio was lots of microscope work identifying microorganisms in pond water. We had to find and document 50 of them. The hard part was the teacher had to come and look and approve, and sometimes they would swim away before he got to our desks.
@TheGFG I’m curious. Have your older kids found college to be easier than high school. I would think, if anything, they’d be way overprepared for the next level.
I’m not GFG, but I can tell you that my youngest is more relaxed in college than she was in high school.
Yes, both said college was a big relief. Not that the college material wasn’t difficult, but they had fewer hours in class, no busy work or craft projects, and almost never had group project partners who didn’t pull their own weight. Most importantly, they had greater control over the management of their time due to receiving a detailed syllabus on the first day of class. In high school, the kids walk and in and get a huge project thrown at them with no warning, and only a few days to complete it. The teacher doesn’t care that you already have two other projects and three tests the same week. It was extremely common for them to be overburdened through no fault of theirs, though when kids griped at school the teachers would always imply that their problem was procrastination even when that was not a factor.
That said, both kids were on a quarter system, which was sometimes problematic for time management due to compression. The student may know he has a paper due at midterm, but he has not gotten taught the background needed to immediately start on it. In fact several times when D got a nice head start, it was not worth it because then afterward the prof would clarify and give more detailed instructions that revealed she had taken the wrong approach.
But yes, they much preferred college.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but my high school was like what you describe, in the sense it was the existence of AP courses that encouraged teachers to teach more rigorously. My high school only offered regular physics, not AP, but because physics is recommended for those planning on going to engineering, many strong students took it. But the class was still taught poorly, to the point where one would learn more physics by taking the calculus class. Having strong students in the class did not make the class taught any better, in part because I think the teacher didn’t really know any physics in the first place.
I’m shocked! An AP teacher who didn’t know the material? How is that possible? Don’t high school teachers need to major in the subject matter they teach? It shouldn’t have been that hard for them to prepare even if the particular subject was not their specialty. Are you sure you aren’t exaggerating to justify some personal inadequacy?
:)) Just kidding and reprising the earlier pages of the thread.
@mom2and sums up what I was going to say about our NJ district (maybe it’s the same one ) The weighted GPA’s seem fair , and our students do well with college placement. Our school does not do an “honors” version of an AP course, and does not have different weights for each. So the max GPA is 4.5, and I don’t think that is even attainable because freshman year allows for only two weighted classes (3 if you are in the GT program). The jr/sr year can be stressful for the kids who take all AP and honors. But many kids, including mine, do okay by taking a mix of AP /honors/ and college prep classes. Our high school does not give credits for classes taken over the summer or offer testing-out options. This has been a huge plus in clamping down on the academic rat race described by @TheGFG
I would add that ours is a big sports town, so I think that helps with some of the elite college placements. And there is quite a rat race with all the sports related stuff - summer camps, travel teams, etc. etc. , with mediocre kids spending untold hours in sports, and I find that just as objectionable as the academic rat race. However, since the academic rat race seems to be fostered by an ambitious, non-white minority, it is therefore under greater scrutiny? Seems like a double standard to me.
@TheGFC I totally know what you were doing there. But that is actually a huge dilemma for my son. He wants to be a Physics teacher. He’d like to get his major in Physics. But if he doesn’t get the major in Physics Education, he won’t have the opportunity to student teach or take some other education classes that are really kind of important if you want to manage a classroom. In his experience, the ones who alternatively certified because their major was in their subject often have the hardest time actually connecting to or teaching high school students. Certainly the Physics Education degree still has quite a number of Physics classes. But I do actually think deciding between the subject major and the education major is a dilemma for a lot of would be teachers.
Isn’t it common for the aspiring high school teacher to major in the subject matter (e.g. physics) plus add whatever course work is listed as a prerequisite for teacher credentialing in the state where s/he wants to teach?
Physics major degree programs probably consume about half of the credits in a bachelor’s degree program, leaving the rest for general education and free elective courses (some of which may be used on teacher credentialing prerequisites if available).
An entering physics major just needs, at the minimum besides general college-prep, high school physics and precalculus, though having had calculus in high school is desirable. Some chemistry may also be required, so high school chemistry is also desirable (AP chemistry would be a bonus).