When sophomore pianist Nia Stevenson entered AP Seminar this year, she was not expecting the imminent onslaught of deadlines. “I thought it was going to be like a typical Honors English class, just going at a faster pace with readings and vocabulary,” she said.

The first few months were easy: discussing ethical dilemmas through “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and analyzing arguments in Sophocles’ Antigone were part of the standard English II curriculum at the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA).

But the expected activities quickly gave way to rubric readings, mock performance tasks, and all the deadlines involved with AP Seminar, a year-long research and writing class from CollegeBoard’s Advanced Placement Program.

The class at BSA – dubbed “AP Seminar English II” in the course catalog – mixes the AP Seminar class structure with English standards from the City’s required curriculum, Odell Education.

BSA introduced AP Seminar English II this school year, after Baltimore City Public Schools piloted the course last year at other schools and removed Honors English II from the course catalog.

This hybrid class is not unusual: according to CollegeBoard, many schools already offer AP Seminar as a 10th grade English credit. However, many of these schools also offer an alternative 10th grade Honors option, while BSA only offers the AP Seminar hybrid class or grade-level English 10. In the two previous cases it was offered at BSA, the course was an additional elective, not an English credit.

Integrating concepts from Seminar into the required Odell Education curriculum was a challenge left to teachers like Meredith Simmons, BSA’s librarian and one of two Seminar teachers.

“I took the Odell curriculum and the Seminar concepts and tried to weave them together. For example, at the start of the year, I presented four readings from the Odell curriculum, and then students picked one and tried to come up with a topic based on the reading to give a presentation about. That’s a direct connection to the AP Exam for this class,” said Simmons.

Simmons’ combination of required English curriculum with Seminar activities is expected. A sample AP Seminar course syllabus from CollegeBoard guides teachers on incorporating literary texts into the class.

However, once the Odell standards were fulfilled, students jumped right into the first of two AP Seminar performance tasks, which are two month-long projects involving a preliminary research report and a final presentation. 

Some students were caught off guard by the sudden heavy workload. “I was swamped: it went from 0 to 60 really quickly. I was used to having barely any homework for English, and then it was like, ‘Oh, I have to write an entire essay on my own,’” said Taylor.

BSA’s busy arts schedule often left students scrounging for time to work. “That class really burned me out, which impacted my arts: my recital is next week and I don’t know my music. I just didn’t have time to do anything with piano,” said Stevenson.

Managing missing students was particularly difficult for the teachers to attempt, like in December, when dancers often missed their academics for performances of The Nutcracker. 

“There was a chunk of time where dancers weren’t there, and I needed to set up groups for the first performance task. It was hard putting that all together, and we had to hold off at some points for certain arts opportunities,” said Simmons.

Dancers were often left to complete work outside of school, like sophomore Moira Capista, who missed three academic classes and had to make it up in the evenings. The consequences of all these absences quickly became apparent.

“When I got back after Nutcracker, I was really clueless – English is usually my strongest subject, but when writing the IRR [the first of two CollegeBoard-graded research papers] I was confused about what the actual task was,” said Capista.

Schedule conflicts became all the more clear leading up to April 30, CollegeBoard’s hard deadline for two large-scale research reports. Seminar students and teachers had to work around Spring Break, Arts Switcheroo and Springfest, field trips for The Muse and the Black Student Union, four music performances, the sophomore actors’ Historical Scenes production, sophomore film deadlines, and the Maryland State Student Survey, not to mention jury preparation for all art departments.

While Simmons understands the dense arts schedule, she must work around CollegeBoard’s hard deadlines, and the issue is only exacerbated by BSA’s short class times. “42 minute periods means I have to make lessons shorter and faster. If a student has 42 minutes of work time, they have to be prepared to focused that whole time and do work in class,” said Simmons.

BSA followed the recommended timeframe for the class, beginning the first AP-graded task in December and lending roughly three months to each assignment. Some students were still left reeling from a dizzying array of work.

“There were all these individual deadlines: one for the outline, then the works cited, and so on. That was stressing me out because I couldn’t do the outline since I still hadn’t done the research. With all these small deadlines, it felt like Ms. Simmons was trying to control how I wanted to work. As a teacher, I suppose she should, and I know she did that so we wouldn’t stress out over the whole thing, but I can’t work like that,” said Stevenson.

In the end, the performance tasks were submitted, the presentations were delivered, and the AP Exam was completed.

Reflecting on the busy first year of Seminar at BSA, Simmons acknowledged some necessary changes: “Next year, I need to add more AP and still keep the structure of Odell. I got most of Odell and most of AP, but I didn’t really see a clear connection of how they blend together.”

AP Seminar is here to stay at BSA, for now. Next year’s group of sophomores will face a new set of materials and due dates, but the schedule conflict between arts and academics is eternal. 

Capista’s advice? “Get ahead – if you’re in the Dance Department, you have to get ahead and talk to your teachers. If one thing is late, you’re done for – you have to be ahead of the game,” she said.

To contact this writer, email Muse Newspaper at musebsa@bsfa.org.

Featured photo by Hassan Hunt for The Muse.