The bell rings, and like clockwork, students slide into their seats: laptops open, pencils out, minds ready for whatever the day will bring. For them, it is routine. Familiar faces, familiar material, another step in a near ending school year. For me, it was anything but.

The assignment sounded simple enough: walk into a class I have never taken and survive. I held my head up high and walked into Advanced Placement (AP) Physics C Mechanics with no prior background, no preparation, just a schedule and a seat I wasn’t entirely sure I deserved. Within minutes, the board was flooded with vocab terms, force body diagrams (FBDs) and coefficients I had never heard of. Around me, heads nodded, pencils scribbled, and as I looked around everyone knew what they were doing. I, on the other hand, could not have been more lost.

As the period progressed, it got worse. We did a deep dive on drag and its impact on an object once it reaches equilibrium. Honestly, I was still trying to understand what drag even meant in this context, and I found it was not the type you find on a race track. My intellectual pride was already on the line and unfortunately, it was only the first period.

Next I made my way to third period, AP French Language and Culture. I wish I could say it got better from there, but, spoiler alert, it didn’t. Class consisted of worksheets of doom and ended with scrutinizing AP classroom assignments. Now, given that I couldn’t even figure out how to say hello in French, these tasks were particularly daunting. To add on, there were strict rules against speaking any English, so I stayed silent.

After AP French I felt very demoralized. I realized that there was a good reason I am not enrolled in those classes and I would like to keep it that way. Piece of advice, if you don’t want to feel like a person with a fifth grader’s IQ, don’t sit for classes you don’t take.