The Last AP Review

I had two weeks this year to review the entire course material with my students before they took their exam on May 16, and for the first week the students had time to fill in the gaps in their knowledge with a review packet that also forced them to articulate some complex ideas. This meant, however, that for that first week many of the students could only focus on what they did not know, and they became a bit anxious. So on the day before the exam I decided I needed to make them feel more empowered with an activity, and this is when I had one of the most rewarding moments. 

I split the class into three different groups of four people each, and each group was given a stack of cards with 60 identifications on it, ranging from important historical figures and artists (e.g. Simon Bolivar; Claude Monet) to important historical documents (e.g. The Tale of Genji; Truman Doctrine) to important historical concepts (e.g. Social Darwinism; umma). I told the groups that in ten minutes they had to categorize each card however they wanted, but they needed to consider how to group their cards based on similar themes or based on cause and effect. I was explicit that they were not allowed to group items solely based on time period or region, and that each grouping had to have 3-5 items.

It was fascinating to watch them work: each group laid out their cards in a haphazard way on the floor, and as the time ticked away, slowly I watched order come out of the chaos. The students had great debates within their groups about the creativity of their categories, the criteria for their groupings, and in the end we walked around the room and each group had to share and explain all of their categories to everyone else. They all enjoyed seeing how differently they connected the 60 items.

What was particularly rewarding about this exercise is that at the end of it, I reminded them of the first day of class, when they struggled with the first activity of the year. On that day I had written the six chronological units of the course on the board, and had placed six corresponding stations around the classroom that had a variety of images and artifacts from a unit. They had to rotate from station to station and match the images with their correct chronological unit, and on that first day they understandably had a different time just identifying some of the 25 laminated images in the stations. Yet now, on the day before the test, they had proven their command over the material and had each come up with different ways of understanding 10,000 years of history. It was a nice way to stand back in awe as the bell rang and I could wish them luck on the exam.