When signing up for my classes last year, I experienced an unexpected wave of motivation. I do not exactly know where this wave of motivation came from; however, I ended up signing up for three APs, when at the time, I took zero.

Going into the school year, I was extremely nervous to take on what I had committed to. But, all of my older friends I heard that APUSH, APES, and AP Lang were all great courses to take together, so I knew I was up for the challenge. Now, emerging from the school year, I would 100% recommend the choice I made last year to incoming juniors. I would recommend the combination of these three courses for multiple different reasons.

To start, I was extremely surprised to find out that APES, APUSH, and AP Lang each provide different facts and sets of skills crucial to success in the other. For example, on both the APUSH and AP lang exams, students are required to argumentatively write supporting a thesis. Throughout the year in APUSH, students are focused on memorizing people, dates, and more, so enhancing one’s writing is not exactly students main goal throughout the year. However, in AP Lang, students are constantly honing in on the computer in order to master their writing abilities, especially in an argumentative fashion. This is done by memorizing various paragraph structures to support your argument and quickly analyzing passages. These skills developed from my AP Lang class have significantly contributed to my success on APUSH writings, and I hope that it shines through on the AP exam this may.

In addition, APUSH has contributed to various successes of mine in AP Lang. Since AP Lang is a class centered around non-fiction works, there are a lot of historical writings we analyze in class. For example, we just recently read a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, which we learned all about in our APUSH class. This gave me a lot of insightful background information that I would have never known had I not taken APUSH. Another example of this correlation occurred between my APES class and my AP Lang class. In APES, we learned about Rachel Carson, an advocate for the limited use of a pesticide, DDT. Prior to being introduced to this in APES, we had read a writing of Rachel Carson’s in AP lang called Silent Spring. This helped provide me with background information when I took a quiz in APES which referenced Rachels views on the harms of DDT.

According to Ethan Lee (11), a student who also takes APES, APUSH, and AP Lang, he believes that “taking these three courses together is very helpful because they teach you good life schools and contribute to developing your work ethic. These three classes work so together”

Overall, I highly recommend the combination of these three courses – especially for one’s junior year. I think that many important life skills and important concepts to understand are taught in these classes which are essential to life outside of high school.