Ms. Khafif's AP Art History

Original Dates: Fall 1991- Summer 1992

A couple of weeks ago, I uploaded some of my old vacation photos to Frommers.com. As I was writing the captions, I was surprised that I used words like oculus, coffers, bas relief, frieze, dolmens and megaliths all in one day. Where did this come from? Well, it started way back in the early 90's. My first period class during my junior year in high school was AP Art History with Ms. Khafif... another major turning point in my life.

The class began as a normal sized one... maybe 15 people. It quickly became 6, as students dropped it out of intimidation. That's the smallest class I've ever been in... 6! It was great because we all became close and had a lot of personal attention from Ms. Khafif. This was the most difficult and intense academic class I've ever taken. I'm glad I had it in high school because it gave me the proper conditioning to do as well as I did in college. We had to read around 50 pages per night and I believe chapter outlines were required. Luckily I had that experience from junior high science with Mr. Root. We had 10-page term papers during long vacations and then the college level AP test at the end of the year. During and after this class, I didn't have lower than an A- in any other class from my junior year on. In college, I never had below an A- in any academic class. And I attribute that streak to this high school AP Art History class. It wasn't just the grades though. This class helped gain interest in all other classes. Before, I put in very little effort. If I worked as hard as I did during my freshman and sophomore years, I could've gotten close to a valedictorian GPA.