Accepted

Today, I got an email I've been anxiously awaiting for about a month. College Board, one of The Powers That Be in my life, has graciously read and approved my syllabus for the AP Audit, and I can now continue to teach AP.

For those of you who don't know it, and I'm assuming that's most of you, College Board decided that this year, all teachers of AP courses would have to submit syllabi to prove their courses were living up to College Board expectations. Failure to submit a syllabus or failure to have said syllabus approved would mean that the school no longer had the right to put AP on any schedule or transcript. Needless to say, even more stress than usual was on AP teachers this year.

It may not sound like much to somebody who wasn't a part of it, but some teachers were so stressed and/or offended that they decided not to teach AP anymore. I knew about it from a workshop I went to last summer, so it wasn't a surprise to me, but I didn't actually know what they wanted as I was preparing my syllabus for submission. That's largely because THEY didn't know what they wanted. The nature of an AP course makes it impossible to proscribe "one right way" to run it. So much of the evaluation process had to be subjective for that reason. It's never comforting when your job lies on subjective evaluation.

For me, though, it's done. No rewrites, no last minute revisions. Now I can concentrate on just getting my stuff together for next year. Fancy that...a teacher who is finally free to start working on stuff to teach....