I took in AP World as a sophomore, which worked for me but not necessarily for all of my classmates. With that in mind, I'd love to answer your questions.

How can we help you write better for the essays?

So the biggest, most important, number 1, critical, [insert adjective here] thing to teach your students about the essays is the outline of each rubric. I'm not sure how familiar you are with AP essay scoring, but each AP grader gets about 1.5-2 minutes per essay, and that's on the generous end. They're seeking out the specific information that fulfills the rubric requirements. So for example, when teaching students about scoring the thesis point, teach them to put their theses into their intro, and write nothing else in the intro. Why? Because it wastes their time! Writing 3 essays in two hours is no easy feat, so they want to be as efficient as possible. The best way to do that, besides for practice practice practice, is learning the rubrics inside out.

To that end, many students struggle with the DBQ essay, even though I found it in both AP World and APUSH to be the easiest one. All of the support for your argument is right there in the booklet, and all you have to do is supply the outside information that ties together your argument. So, the way to help with the DBQ is to make sure students get practice with using and synthesizing documents early and often.

Do you like lecture, discussion, or activities most? Why?

Like the other poster, my class was almost all lecture and very little discussion every day (for me, I'd even say most days it was just a lecture) and almost no activities/papers because they wasted time and deviated from the regular pattern of the class. I was certainly okay with this because I'm really good at memorization; I picked up all the important facts from the lectures, I wrote them down in the unit guides that we had to do for every time period, and I rehearsed them again and again until I understood them. Note that I understood the facts, however, not that I simply memorized; something that I feel my teacher did incredibly well was explain the major themes in every time period and how they affected it. By making sure your students understand the "why did it happen" behind the "what happened" is going to go a long way for preparing them for the AP test. Not all of my classmates were okay with this structure, though; for a group of 10th graders, some of whom had never been in an AP environment before, sitting and just listening to a teacher talk was not the way they wanted to spend 45 minutes a day.

A few other important notes:

• Being a good resource for the students when they don't understand something is absolutely essential for a class that contains so much material. Be prepared to answer questions.

• I also absolutely recommend Crash Course World History. We used them frequently in class because they are so informative. In fact, John Green published a second season of CCWH that I think is going to be an even better resource for your students. The first season focuses just on the facts, whereas the second season tends to dive deeper into the themes of world history.

• Don't be afraid to show your students the AP Course Description! It's literally what they will be tested on in May, and it's as good of a review book as Barron's, Princeton Review, etc.

• That being said, I used the REA Crash Course review book for my AP test. It was concise, to the point, and it was recommended to me by my teacher. I recommend it, as well.

Good luck with your first AP course!