What’s the robot going for here? Don’t have the foggiest idea.

Access Isn’t Enough

On course registration, student stress, and the limits of access without support

A Question

One of the things I do with my classes is ask them an attendance question every lesson. I have a document with about 75 of these that I rotate through over the course of the year. Frequently it’s stuff like “what’s your favorite food?” or “what book do you think everyone should read?” or “what is your plan for the upcoming break?” Sometimes I use them to have a conversation about other things too, something like “thinking about last semester, what is one thing you want to do better this semester?” or “what is one thing you can do in a course where you are currently struggling so that you don’t feel like you’re struggling so much?” I really like attendance questions for their ability to get some conversation going at the start of class that isn’t focused on science. We’re going to do a lot of discussion about science over the course of our time together, and I don’t want my students to think that I only think about them as science learners. They’re people. I like them, and I want to know more about them.

We are in the middle of course registration for next year, so an attendance question I asked last week was: “How many AP and Advanced Topics (AT) courses are you taking next year?” Every kid answered with a number, and I tallied those numbers on the board as they said them.

The data concerned me. Out of the ~65 chemistry students I teach across both the general and honors level sophomore versions of that course, the mean answer was more than three. The least common answer on the low end was two (said by three students). No student said zero. I followed up with another question: How many students in each class had reached out to the teachers of those subjects to learn what those classes were actually going to be like? No hands were raised. A few hands went up when I asked if students understood what the summer work would look like. And (perhaps helpfully) many hands went up when I asked if they had discussed their course selections with their parents.

A Pattern

I’ve been teaching high school for 22 years at this point, and it has been my observation across two pretty different schools that junior year is the most stressful year of high school for most students. Junior year is the year when you start thinking about college, you take your SATs, and you have to reckon with the fact that a pretty significant life decision point is soon coming to meet you. In my New York public school, junior year was stressful, but it didn’t seem nearly as stressful as it does at my current Singapore international school. Which is actually kind of strange, because the students in New York had more of what might be considered existential needs than many of the students in Singapore do. And yet, every year when I open my AP Biology class (an audience of juniors and seniors) and show them data about what prior students have reported about their experience in the course, knowing that some of those sitting in my audience are taking four, five, or more AP and AT courses, I make it clear that I have no capacity to attenuate the significant workload that is AP Biology. They smile and nod, and politely do not believe me. This continues for about a month, at which point they cannot switch out of AP Biology, and some of them have to reckon with the fact that they have bitten off a giant chunk of complex science for their already stressful junior year, and are in for a rough ride. I dislike this.

A Problem

To be clear, I do not dislike it because I think those students should not be in my class. I am not a gatekeeper, and I’ve spent a lot of my life as an educator trying to remove barriers to entry into courses wherever I can. I do not want any student who wants to be in AP Biology to be kept out of it. From where I stand, if there is even one student in my school who would benefit from taking AP Biology but can not because of some institutional barrier placed in their way, that would be harmful.

But I also don’t think that every reason for being in AP Biology is a good one. One easy example: AP Biology is one of the courses at my school that carries an increased GPA weighting (which is true of every AP and AT course we offer). I have to think that for some students taking four, five, six, or seven of these courses in a year, they are more concerned about achievement than they are about learning a subject of deep interest at a genuinely challenging level. Chasing a weighted grade is not a valid reason for loading up on AP and AT courses. Particularly because the stress burden that tends to accompany students who take too many of these courses is, itself, harmful.

A Gap

At my current institution, I think the problem is that we have focused on increasing access without also attending to supporting students effectively when they sign up for courses. We have no firm guidelines or rules that meaningfully limit the number of AP and AT courses students can take. We have no regular process by which a student signing up for three, four, or five AP or AT courses has to connect with some arm of the school to confirm they are actually well-positioned to do so. What process exists to catch a student who has never been in an AP or AT course and is about to walk into three of them during junior year? Who is asking a student why, if they struggle to turn in homework regularly in a general-level course and tend to show up without a pencil, they want to pursue multiple AP and AT courses next year? Who is having a conversation with our students to see if this is actually a wise choice, given the workload of each of those courses in combination with their extracurricular commitments, and their need to have an enjoyable and well-balanced life? The point is not to say “you can’t take this course because it’s beyond you.” It’s to say “you should not take this course because it is deeply unwise for your wellbeing, given everything else you’re doing, and that’s okay.” No one is doing any of this (absent the occasional teacher with the presence of mind to ask a relevant attendance question 😉)

This is where my current system falls apart. In my New York school, we didn’t have to worry about this much because students were generally not going to take more than two or three AP courses in a year. They were more connected to other aspects of their lives than school, and they better understood that academic achievement in high school is perhaps the least significant metric by which a teenager ought to organize their life. I’m not interested in dissecting all the reasons why the students in my current school (whom I truly enjoy and care about) haven’t internalized this lesson as clearly as their less privileged peers have, but I do think it’s a real phenomenon. And the inability of my institution to support students in making good, healthy course choices is a significant source of frustration for me. Am I complicit in leading kids into assumptions about academics and performance that are fundamentally at odds with maximizing their flourishing? What should I think about the rather perverse knock-on effect of lowering access as a means to increase equity, when it also broadens other kinds of harm? I don’t have a good answer to these questions, but they are definitely things I think about a lot, particularly at this time of year.

What I do know is that “you can take whatever you want” is not a policy. It’s an abdication of harm prevention that is at least as significant as limiting access. Access matters. Removing arbitrary barriers to rigorous coursework is genuinely important, and I believe that. But access without any corresponding infrastructure for support, advising, and honest conversation is just a different way of failing kids. Someone needs to be having hard conversations with students before they register, not after they’re stuck. That doesn’t have to mean gatekeeping. It means actually caring enough to slow the process down. Whether my institution ever gets there, I genuinely don’t know. But I don’t think I’m wrong that it should.

Does your school have any guardrails around course loads, or is it essentially the wild west? I’d love to know how other institutions handle this. Drop a line in the various places, or leave a comment on this piece.

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