To All the Classes I’ve Loved Before

Dear former classes,

They say you can never forget your first love. Apparently, you never forget your first DBQ score, either. I have loved, and I have lost (especially points on FRQs because I forgot to include units). Looking back on my academic journey, I find myself overwhelmed by the urge to reopen Jupiter, stare at my grades, and wonder where it all went wrong. Each of you entered my life at a different time, promised me intellectual growth, and left me with academic baggage that no amount of extra credit could resolve.

And so, before I move on to my next academic situationship, I have a few things I need to say.

To My Dearest AP World History, 

My first love. 

I remember when we first met. I was young, naïve, and under the impression that history was just a bunch of dead people doing random things around the world. You changed that. You taught me about the rise and fall of empires, the fragility of political systems, and the 38-minute war. Most importantly, you taught me that no matter how much I loved you, there would always be another chapter.

I gave you everything: my weekends, my sleep, and the last functioning neurons in my brain. I memorized trade routes for you, learned the names of rulers I’d forget a week later, and spent entire evenings writing SAQs that required me to explain a historical development in three sentences or less. Three sentences! After assigning me six chapters of reading! Even after that, what did you give me in return? A DBQ with seven documents, three of which I couldn’t understand, and a rubric that made me question whether I had ever learned to read.

Still, I cannot hate you. Every time I saw a map, I was reminded of you. When a country experienced political instability, I wondered what historical theme it would fit under. I couldn’t look at a revolution without thinking about the conditions that caused it, the people who participated, and the extent to which it represented continuity or change. You have permanently altered the way I see the world, and I suppose that is what love does.

I hope you are happy, AP World. I hope you’ve found another student willing to memorize the causes of revolutions at 2:00 a.m. Just know that no matter how many history courses I take, none of them will ever make me feel quite as academically imbalanced as you did.

Yours, across every era,

Your former student.

Unfortunately, my next love taught me that history wasn’t the only subject capable of making me question my life choices. Some relationships end with a revolution. Others end your GPA.

To My Beloved, Honors Chemistry, 

People say that relationships require balance. With you, I learned that everything requires balance: chemical equations, redox reactions, and the increasingly unstable relationship between my academic ambitions and actual abilities.

At first, I thought we had chemistry. We talked about bonds and attraction. We learned about forces that hold things together. I thought we understood each other. Then you introduced stoichiometry, and suddenly I was converting grams to moles to particles, calculating theoretical yields, and trying to determine how much product I could produce in a hypothetical universe where I understood what I was doing. 

I tried to make it work. I really did. I watched review videos. I redid practice problems. I stared at my notes with the determination of a chemist. I balanced equations until I started seeing coefficients in my sleep. Every time I thought I’d finally understood a concept, a new problem appeared with different numbers, a different compound, and a different opportunity to embarrass myself.

I will never forgive you for making me calculate the limiting reactant when I was already the limiting factor in my own education. And yet, I still think about you. Every time I see a periodic table, my heart skips a beat. Or perhaps that is just stress-induced cardiomyopathy (broken heart syndrome) and/or too much coffee.

I hope you find someone who understands you without needing to consult a Regents-approved 2025-edition reference sheet. Someone who can identify every polyatomic ion on sight. Someone who doesn’t count the atoms on both sides of an equation three times and still forgets a hydrogen atom.

I was not that person. 

With mixed reactions,

Your old partner in lab.

After chemistry, I promised myself I would never again fall for a subject that made me listen to “The Element Song” on repeat. I wanted something gentler. Something beautiful. Something where the rules might actually make sense if I just practiced enough.

Then I met French, and discovered that even when the answer is technically correct, the teacher can still find 17 reasons to mark it as illogique.

To My Long-Distance Love, French,

Mon amour. 

From the moment we met, I knew you were different. You were elegant, mysterious, and undeniably beautiful. Your accents were charming, your vocabulary was romantic, and your grammar possessed a certain je ne sais quoi. I wanted to understand you. I wanted to speak your language, to express my deepest thoughts in the language of love itself.

So I studied you. I memorized vocabulary, practiced conjugations, and learned the difference between être and avoir. I learned to say je t’aime before I could confidently explain what I had done over the weekend. I could conjugate an entire verb in three tenses, yet the moment someone asked me “Comment ça va?”, my brain would conveniently forget that I had an A in French.

Our relationship was complicated from the beginning. Why must every noun have a gender? Why must your verbs change their forms depending on who’s performing the action? And why, after all these years, do you insist on pronouncing letters that aren’t even there while refusing to pronounce the ones that are? I’ve given you my time, my effort, and sacrificed several perfectly good pencils to conjugation charts. The least you could do is make yourself a little easier to understand. 

I still believe that one day our conversations will feel effortless. One day, I’ll understand what you say the first time and respond with an accent that sounds just as good as it did inside my head. 

Either way, I refused to give up on us. After everything we’ve been through, I deserve to at least understand a French movie without subtitles.

Avec amour, 

Your very confused student.

Looking back, I should perhaps thank you all. You taught me perseverance, critical thinking, and how to maintain a straight face when a teacher announces that the test will be “just like the practice problems.” You taught me to keep going after a bad grade, even if “keep going” means opening Jupiter six more times in the hope that the number has changed.

Anyhow, there are new classes to meet, new syllabi to pester my parents into signing, and new grades waiting to humble me. But I’ll probably fall in love again. And I’ll probably get a 73.