Personal Narrative: My Four AP Calculus BC Class

Throughout middle school and my first 2 years in high school, I’ve gotten mainly As in my classes with an occasional B here and there. So in my junior year of high school, when I heard that I can take more than 1 AP course, I immediately wanted to challenge myself. I registered for 4 AP courses along with orchestra, and spanish on top of my extracurriculars. “Are you trying to kill yourself?” is what all my friends asked when I told them about my plan. Their worries only fueled my urge to continue with this difficult challenge. So I ambitiously went on to starting the year with 4 AP courses. However, things did not go as expected. Among my 4 AP courses, one of the classes I took was AP calculus BC. I heard it was known as one of the hardest,

We learned the material in class and was assigned homework everyday. However, when the test came along, the results I obtained were devastating. Test after test, I kept getting C’s, D’s and even E’s. Every time I get a bad test score back, I would shrug it off. “The next test will be better,” I kept telling myself. But my scores never got better. Halfway throughout the first trimester, my teacher and counselor asked if I wanted to drop the course. Although I understood they asked that because my scores showed that I was struggling with the class, I told them that I was confident that I would raise my grade. With doubtful eyes, my teacher and counselor let me continue the course. Even though I did try a little harder, my test scores barely improved. So when I finished the second trimester with a D in the class, I was completely devastated. Only then did I realize that there’s no going back and that my time was running out. I was thrown into a pit of despair, probably due to the unconscious stress that’s been building up. But it was then when I finally came to realization of the problem: me. It wasn’t the hard class or the teacher or my studying style, but it was my mentality that was holding me back. I thought that what I had was confidence, when it was really just arrogance. That arrogance blinded me from the fact that AP calculus BC isn’t a typical high school course, it’s an actual college level course. It dawned to me that