Dread. Restlessness. Nausea. Stress. These feelings are just a few of those painfully familiar to every junior at Middleborough High School who is enrolled in Advanced Placement Language and Composition—more commonly known as: AP Lang. 

    The torturous journey begins in the spring of sophomore year and continuously haunts you until the last day of junior year. As a naive sophomore, you feel good about your academic schedule for the upcoming year - great even. You ignore warnings that, “Junior year is the hardest year of high school,” and that “You’re going to die in Lang.” You overlook the juniors’ hyperbolic tweets including: “Death by AP Lang,” “Rationales will be the death of me…or just the cause of my carpal tunnel,” and “R.I.P. to my motivation.” Little did you know that in just two short months, you, too, would be slammed, day after day by AP Lang.

    The summer prior to junior year is the worst. Like most high school students, you hold off on summer work until a week or two before the first day of school. However, this time, you read the five page packet containing the Lang assignment and BOOM: congratulations on your first AP Lang mental breakdown. 

    Paranoia. This feeling is associated with phase one of this course; it is introduced to students on the first day of AP Lang, and predominantly lingers until late October or early November. These are the “adjusting weeks” for AP Lang victims—I mean, students. By feeling paranoid, I am referring to: 

• the late nights spent completing every inch of the homework assigned; 

• the deep breath inhaled every time one steps foot into class first block in the morning;

• the furious note-taking that occurs during a lesson in an effort to absorb every new piece of material; 

• the sheets of tears that shed from your tear ducts as you learn of an upcoming full-length multiple choice test; and

• the anxious tapping of your pen as you sit in class daily and wish on your dear life that you are not called on to answer a question (a question about which you are utterly clueless).

During these first few weeks, students will be invited to hate their lives via stacks of handouts, introductory vocabulary quizzes, rationales, and new forms of essays. In this first phase, students not only suffer from constant paranoia, but the typical stress and physical pain associated with writing quick writes and rationales. 

    Stress. Blatant and overwhelming stress. Welcome to phase two—ultimately experienced over the entire course of AP Lang, but for the purposes of this article, most commonly initiated during early November and continuing through mid-January. In this phase, students cry. A lot. In this phase, students have spent enough time in class to know that they are fully expected to write a five page essay within forty-eight hours. Students are familiar with logging onto Aspen every ten minutes in order to examine how much their latest quick write has tanked their class average. Students are familiar with experiencing mental breakdowns an average of three times a week due to homework overload. Students’ camera rolls, during this phase, strictly contain screenshots of assignments or handouts, and selfies of them smiling with tears streaming down their faces. 

    Exhaustion. Newly addicted to caffeine and experiencing sleep deprivation. You have now entered phase three. “I’m still alive but I’m barely breathing,” is your new catchphrase. Students encounter this phase anywhere between January and February, and dwell in it until the end of April. During these months, students grow increasingly tolerant of heading to bed after midnight, as their motivation simultaneously decreases like a plane coming down for landing. The AP Lang workload does not necessarily increase significantly, but students tend to jump on the “I’ll do it later” or the “I don’t care anymore” bandwagon. At this point, you will find yourself procrastinating more about completing assignments than one would hesitate about jumping off a skyscraper. You no longer cry or experience mental breakdowns—you turn cold and void. You are numb to the continuous pain and stress of AP Lang. 

    Desperation. Your ultimate wish at this time, in phase four, is for the invention of a time machine. It is May now, and you and your classmates are days away from sitting for the AP Lang exam. In this phase, you push and push yourself. Prior to this phase, you have taken advantage of your newly mastered skills in writing a synthesis (Q1), a rhetorical analysis (Q2), and an argument (Q3). Here, the late nights remain, the paranoia resurfaces, and the tears reform. Your brain is in constant motion, scanning for every piece of material, every trick, every definition, and every strategy that you have learned and stored over the last seven or so months. 

    After the exam, I can only imagine that life goes uphill from there. The ten page research paper that is ready to be assigned is sure to be a breeze compared to select assignments from past months—like the Superman and Me Q2, or the Birmingham Q2. 

    Do not let this article fool you—enrolling in AP Lang was the smartest decision I could have made as a high school student. Looking back, I am undeniably grateful for:

• every pen I threw away that ran out of ink, 

• every late night I spent writing essays or rationales, 

• every bond I created with my cellmates—I mean, classmates, 

• every trip to the bathroom I took to wash an ink smear off my hand, 

• every tear that flowed from my eyeballs, and 

• every dose of Advil I took to treat my stress-induced migraines. 

Furthermore, I feel fully competent in my ability to qualify on the AP exam, and ace the English portion of the SATs. Not to mention my mastery of grammar and rhetoric that has prepared me for college writing.

    To upcoming juniors enrolled in AP Lang: I recommend investing in a “Hang in there!” poster for your bedroom wall with a cute cat depicted on it, and coming to terms with the fact that you will cry more over the course of the next school year than you did on the day your first pet fish died. However, do not waste a single moment of this class. Do not take for granted how hard your teacher will push you and encourage you to do the best that you can. Most especially, do not wish away your high school years due to the crippling stress from AP Lang—cherish every aspect of them.