While the majority of students want nothing to do with school work during summer vacation, some teachers will be attending training programs for the upcoming school year.

One of these is AP Physics B teacher and Science Department lead Michael Voth, who will attending a five day workshop June 9 through the 14, as the AP Physics program is altering it’s curriculum this year.

“They have training in the summers on teaching every AP course,” Voth said. “So, anytime a course changes, you need to go and be trained on how it’s changed and what the new course is going to be.”

At the summer workshop, Voth will learn a variety of skills to add to the classroom.

“This workshop will introduce AP Physics teachers to strategies they can use to engage students in deeper conceptual understanding of foundational physics principles,” the CollegeBoard website says. “Teachers will examine what Physics Education Research has found with regards to instructional approaches that support students’ enduring understanding of physics concepts. They will also review and engage in several tasks that they can use to help students develop scientific reasoning practices through conceptual-based question types.”

Every year the summer training for high school teachers is taught by a variety of education professionals.

“They are taught by people from the CollegeBoard, college professors, and teachers,” Voth said. “I hope to learn a few things to incorporate into the new curriculum next year.”

Next year major changes are happening to the AP Physics courses.

“They’ve taken AP Physics B and they’ve split it into two courses, AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2,” Voth said. “So now when students have done chemistry, they can either go into AP Physics 1 or do PreAP Physics. “

After taking those courses, students can choose another Physics course.

“Then, when they’re done with either of those, they can then go into AP Physics 2 from either of those, or they can still go to AP Physics C,” Voth said.

Students are both nervous and excited for the new courses.

“I think having the new different courses will be interesting because it’s just something new to take that no one else has,” sophomore Anisa Valentine said. “I hope they’ll still be interesting and we’ll still learn what we need to know, though.”

With new classes for next year, new coursework is being planned.

“The content is realigned and there is probably going to be a new philosophy in it,” Voth said. “It’s going to be more inquiry based, so some of the coursework is going to change.”

Despite the changes in scheduling, the courses are expected to be on the same difficulty level as they were in the past.

“I don’t think the new classes will be more difficult,” Voth said. “I think it will just be slightly different from what students were used to in the past.”

“I think that it’s important for teachers to go to summer institutes so they can learn new techniques to teach AP and they can always improve their learning, teaching and their classroom,” AP Human Geography teacher Homa Lewis said.