Testing Testing 1 2 1 2 3

I knew all year that this time would come, and I knew I'd be in the stress neck-deep. That's right, it's AP week.
-I don't know if you knew, but I took 5 AP classes this year. They were English, Spanish, bio, psych, and calculus. I knew when I signed up for them that it was going to be a heavy load, and it was, but I did my best not to notice. I just treated it like I was getting a normal workload. In fact, it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I realized how hard I've been working all this year to keep my grades up. I hope I can keep this up during college, rather than get totally stressed out. Grinnell is well known as a school where you rarely stop studying. I'll have plenty to occupy me. A lot of it is writing, and I like writing, so not only will I not be miserable doing it, but I'll also hone my writing.
-However, I was supposed to be talking about this week. Actually, AP week is two weeks. Last week, I was testing Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Those were Spanish, calculus and English. Spanish was a really hard one, but only because of the listening comprehension stuff. There was one part where we got a source to read and a source to listen to, both of which were about Hispanics celebrating their national heritage after moving to the US, and then we had two minutes to come up with an oral report about those two sources that would also last two minutes. There was also a simulated phone conversation where a friend calls me up and asks if I want to go to a Shakira concert with him. I was supposed to accept, but I forgot to read the sheet, so I just did what I would've actually done in that situation, which is I refused. Whoops. But I think the oral parts only counted for like 10% of the grade. The rest of it was easy, pretty much. The calculus exam was possible, and I did it. I think I got pretty much all of the ones I answered right, and I only left three blank. Except on the free response; I left two of about 19 parts blank, because I ran out of time. It was tough stuff. The free responses were a lot harder than in previous years. The English exam was difficult; there was one poem called "When I Buy Pictures" that was just flat-out a bad poem. If a poet writes so that the person reading it has no idea what she's saying, the whole point of poetry is lost, and the poem is bad. The AP Board should take note of this. Circumlocution is not a merit. For the Open Essay, they asked me to describe a book where a character has a relationship with the past, either trying to reject it or trying to embrace it. I used The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which is a pretty good book. It's a postapocalyptic book.
-So, tomorrow is bio, and Tuesday is psych. I'm going to be studying for both of them; as soon as I'm done with this blog post, it's to the bio notes with me.
-There's something else I was going to write about, but I have no idea what it was. It might have been books, but I'm going to leave that for the next entry, which, with any luck, will be after Building on Tuesday. Because there's no curriculum left after the test in my AP classes, we're basically socializing with several different groups of friends over the day. I've had only one day of this, and it wasn't complete, because we're still working in bio and psych. (Once you're done with an AP test, you're allowed to leave the building, so I've had three half-days.) When I come back to the skedule on Wednesay, I'll have total nothing. This'll be pretty cool.