If you own an iPhone, how do you feel about it? Is it the best thing in the world? Perhaps, you own a Samsung phone and love it. The debate over Apple vs. Samsung is not new at all. Many people, perhaps...

The constitution of the United States of America says that all men are created equal. What do you think? Are all men created equal? It’s a question that not even the Socratic method can answer. It has...

“I just strangled it soon after it was born. Why keep girls when raising them would be difficult?” In this excerpt from the 2012 documentary It’s A Girl, an Indian woman describes a practice long...

Imagine you're in class. The teacher is checking a thing labeled as a “review sheet” that was due today. Suddenly, someone asks, “Do we have a test soon?” Now imagine there was a hazardous...

Answer this simple question: Can you live without the device you are using to read this article? Chances are, you can’t. This is a known fact to almost all of us. We are truly dependent upon our technology...

Humans are obviously dependent upon the environment. We interact with our surroundings in various ways. For example, we adapt to our environment. People use umbrellas when it is raining and wear warm...

Do you know what it feels like to have an intense fear of going home because you don’t know what mood your parents are going to be in? Do you know what it feels like to have pain constantly reminding you that you haven’t eaten dinner in two days? Do you know what it’s like to live in a house that makes the Warsaw Ghetto look like the Palace of Versailles? Do you know what it feels like to cry yourself to sleep because you don’t know if your dying dad will ever call you his “little angel” again? If you’ve ever gone through any of these things, I am truly and deeply sorry. If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky. Consider yourself lucky that while you might not get the pair of boots you wanted, someone else might be working sixty hours every week just to put food on the table. We should consider ourselves lucky that we have parents who support our decisions. It is proven that parental encouragement can improve grades and raise self-esteem. Abusive or absent parents don’t encourage their kids. So where does that leave those kids?

Everyone in this room intends to succeed as a high school student, yes? As a fellow AP student, I understand and share the pressures being put on you as well as the stress schoolwork can bring. Succeeding in school is difficult. And the education system in place today increases that difficulty by preventing us students from fully understanding concepts that we are being taught and by hindering us from realizing our full intellectual potential.

We find ourselves here, in an AP classroom. We are the smart kids. We are the studiers, the thinkers, and the “leaders of tomorrow,” as the Board of Education likes to say. Isolated from the “regents kids,” we compete within our own faction of Whitman. And within our little faction, we find a series of sub-factions. Here, you will find both the apex students and the pseudo-academics.

Does anyone enjoy spending vacation time completing projects and immense amounts of homework? Does anyone enjoy missing out on parties, on visiting relatives, and going on vacation to do busywork, that, for the most part, is never even looked at or graded? Does anyone actually retain all or any of the information “learned” from summer assignments, or is it rushed to completion because you are not allowed out until it is done?

Summer assignments are often bemoaned by students as unnecessarily laborious and detracting from a much-needed two months of relaxation. This year's task for AP Language students, however, was designed...