I was thinking about Troy and AP tests lately and I just wanted to share my thoughts.

So at Troy, freshmen, for the most part, aren't allowed to take AP tests. There are three reasons, freshmen are immature and are not ready for AP tests, by having only/mostly juniors and seniors take AP tests, average AP score of students is greater and it costs money to teach AP courses. Money problems aside, however, I think that allowing freshmen to take AP classes will improve AP scores.

Why? Because, in general, seniors don't care about AP tests and Juniors have other AP tests to worry about. If AP Bio was offered in the place of Honors Bio, I believe that the scores would go up. Not only will freshmen only have one test to worry about but taking an AP test freshman year will prepare students better for classes sophomore year. Also, if AP tests are taken sooner, then juniors and seniors will have more time to concentrate on other AP tests and scores in those tests will go up as well. Similarly, AP Chem should be offered in the stead of Honors Chem. Honestly, honors Chem is pretty much on par with AP Chem at some other schools. Stress levels will increase for sophomores and freshmen but I believe that it will significantly reduce stress levels for upperclassmen.

One unexpected result of leechblock is that I'm not going on sites such as xanga or facebook as often as I used to. It looks like that's where most of my procrastination time went. Another anti-procrastination tip I learned though, if you guys are using a laptop, you can manually turn off the internet- there's a button for it on the sides or on the front; it looks like a tower. More info later hopefully. Hope everyone is doing well.

P.S. I wanted to post the list of songs I have made for this semester -which a I am very grateful for recommendations btw =) - but it still isn't finalized. It looks like I'm procrastinating  on that... oh well.

For those of you who use firefox (which should be everyone =[ ) I found
a great firefox application that helps block websites that you should
not be using while doing work, such as facebook, gmail, youtube or
xanga or any other popular sites that you gravitate towards while
procrastinating. It also allows you to set the time when these sites
should be blocked (aka 3-10 or whenever you intend to study). Anyway,
here's the site.



https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476



Anyway here are some pictures that I have taken on my trip to Berkeley. No pictures of Berkeley yet though because classes have been oppressive. But there have been many picture oppurtunities. The buildings look really nice at night or early morning.


A foggy picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.



Another picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. Playing around with the diagonal.


A picture of that one windy street like Lombard St. or something.


A picture of my parents


A picture of a bird...


Sailboat



Fisherman's Wharf


Picture of boats.


1337


A picture of my room.


And finally a picture of the dorms.