Personal Narrative: My AP Calculus Class

Resilience is something that I had learned through my hardship in senior year. It was something that was discovered during my most stressful time and saved me from further making myself sick and poisoning my own brain with thoughts of doubt. My most inspiring and challenging hardship was my AP Calculus class. The name by itself caused for shivers and anxiety. Or better yet the teacher who taught the subject was someone much scarier than the subject itself. The class started off at a face pace in the beginning of the year and gave us a taste of what life was going to be like ahead of us as AP Calculus students. We had homework assignments every day. There was no free time for us. Math was our lives at that point. Not only was it the everyday homework assignments and surprise quizzes that stressed us out, but her tests that we would take every so often would take weeks of studying to prepare for and even then success was not guaranteed. Us, students, had a lot of failures in this class, a lot which were inevitable even with the hours of studying that we did and foregoing other teachers work just to keep our head afloat.

It even affected my confidence which affected my performance to some degree because I started to believe that I couldn’t do it. I was less enthusiastic about math and the class as a whole because I had become so paranoid and worried that I was going to fail that day due to the amount of stress and lack of sleep I had been getting. When my grades reflected my lack of confidence, sleep and motivation, I knew there was something I had to