A Thanksgiving Ode to APUSH

I take AP classes. I do school activities. I am the student whom teachers count on to revive class discussions, the girl whom school librarians know by name, and the classmate who never turns in an assignment late.

And so I am, supposedly, a good student.

But behind the masquerade of a good student, I harbor a shameful secret: I used to despise history.

Like many of my peers, I took my first AP course through World History during sophomore year. As the rumors went, World History was a rite of passage—a litmus test that filtered out the brilliant students from the “average” students. And if tests were any indicator, I was definitely, undeniably average.

Yet unlike my peers, I grew to loathe World History. Frankly, I simply could not understand The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. For all that mattered, the entire textbook might as well have been written in Arabic because whether or not I read the chapters, I still failed the tests. And the one time I scored the highest in class was diminished by the fact that I received a 60. I did not actually do well but had simply done the least worst.

Before long, I had set my World History textbook aside to collect dust the way America collects debt. History, I reasoned, is taught by sadistic old men so youthful high school students could learn to appreciate the great outdoors.

At least, that’s what I thought until I met Mrs. Wohlgemuth.

For one, Mrs. Wohlgemuth was not an old man, so there went my theory about teaching history. For two, Mrs. Wohlgemuth didn’t just teach: she flew.

Sitting in Mrs. Wohlgemuth’s third period AP U.S. History class was a lot like trying my mom’s semi-edible pumpkin pie every year (in the best way possible); you never knew what to expect.

Mrs. Wohlgemuth had a way of packing every day’s class agenda like a teeny suitcase—filled with more than enough clothes and shoes as if we were all going on a trip forever and never turning back—without feeling overwhelming. She animated history and single-handedly lifted characters off the page and breathed them alive into the classroom.

When Mrs. Wohlgemuth spoke, she whisked us away with stories and anecdotes and tales of the American founding fathers as if classrooms could transcend time. Her lectures turned an hour into minutes, yet it still felt as if it’d be years before we would catch up to anything she said because she flew through the pages of history the way eagles can soar through the air but flightless penguins cannot.

Through AP U.S. History, I discovered in history what I failed to see before: thrill. I learned to digest decades of American history every week, to write in-class essays at 3,000 words per minute, and to articulate my own theses by dissecting and synthesizing history through the eyeglass of a historian.

Of course, there are some ups and downs to AP U.S. History with Mrs. Wohlgemuth. Some days I didn’t even know what hit me before we’re flying through the next political era. Other days I could barely move my right hand after writing a four-paged in-class essay on Jacksonian economic policy. But I would never trade our class debates, the infamous 939-paged textbook, or my favorite U.S. History teacher for any other class.

And for that, I am thankful.