During the 12th grade, you have the following courses to take: AP English Literature/AP English Language, AP US Government, Geosystems, Senior Research Lab, Math, and two electives.
Once again, you can see a lot of different options for the courses that students can take during their senior year, so a lot of interests start to diverge and people might take different classes, based on their interests and requirements.
One thing to note is that if the student did not take a history class during their 9th grade or in the summer, then one of the electives for 12th grade students must be a history or geography course. There are several options. I took a course called “History of Science and Technology” as one of my electives, to complete the Virginia high school requirement of having taken 4 years of history or geography before graduation.
The student must take at least two AP classes during their senior year. These two classes are AP US Government and AP English Literature/Language. For both government and English, you can choose to have them as an integrated block or as separate classes.
In AP US Government, students learn a lot about founding contracts that the government is based on, how politics work, separation of powers, voting, the two-party system, and more.
You have two choices for your English class – either AP Language or AP Literature. If you like reading a lot of books, take AP Literature. If you like writing a lot, take AP Language. I took AP Language and we did a lot of essays and analysis of books, films, and more.
Geosystems is a class that all seniors must take. There’s a lot of interesting material about the scientific method and Earth geology and rock formation.
You have 13 choices for senior research lab. You’ll have to fill out an application and take the required classes before the research lab. During the research lab, you can work independently or with a partner on a year-long research project. At the end of the year, you’ll give a presentation and submit a paper based on your experiment and your results. I worked with a partner on my experiment, and we were working on using smartphone imaging apps to calculate the concentration of copper in a solution, based on the color.
For one of my electives, I took AP Computer Science. For another elective, I took “History of Science and Technology”, as previously mentioned. I really liked that I took both of these classes.
For my math, I took one semester of “Advanced Mathematical Techniques” which was a very rigorous and interesting course. The course was very well taught and I gained some valuable insights from the course, even though at times I really struggled with the homework. The other semester I took “Introduction to Organic Chemistry”, which was very useful for when I took “Organic Chemistry” in college, since the first three or four chapters overlapped.
I hope this was helpful in clarifying the TJ course curriculum! Please let me know if you have any questions! – Naman
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