1. 1185 Lower Birmingham Road
Canton, GA 30115
April 19, 2012
Judges, Senior Project
Creekview High School
1550 Owens Store Road
Canton, GA 30115
Dear Judges:
My name is Emily Slater and for my entire life, history has been my favorite subject. I
love the stories and learning about how the world we know today was formed by
interactions between people and cultures. Therefore, it only seemed natural that my
senior project would have something to do with social studies education. For my senior
project, I assisted the current AP world history students by creating study guides,
lecturing at review sessions, and having individual tutoring sessions. In this process, I
learned a lot about teaching and actually picked my major based on this project.
While my products might seem simple, a lot of time and effort went into them. There are
about 9 complete study guides. They are each about 6 pages long and are based on the
assigned textbook for AP World History, in addition to the College Board’s former tests
and teaching guides. While these definitely took up the majority of time of my project, I
found the review sessions to be the most intimidating and difficult things. The first time I
lectured, my throat went dry and I could barely get through the material I prepared. With
time, this impediment lessened and, by the end of the process, I could speak semi-
confidently in front of a classroom full of students. My research paper, which was on
how the brain learns, also motivated me to put effort into my public speaking and showed
me the effects that a teacher could have on their student, just by phrasing information a
certain way. However, I was still much more effective in individual tutoring sessions than
in the group sessions by the end.
While my topic and research were related to a career as a social studies teacher, by the
end of the process I discovered that teaching was not the career for me. Before doing this,
I did not fully understand the level of preparation and skill it takes to be an effective
teacher and I simply do not think I would be able to be a teacher and enjoy it. However, I
did enjoy the research I did on the brain and thought that the processes that went into
learning were fascinating. Therefore, when I attend Georgia Tech in the fall, I plan on
majoring in neuroscience and learning more about how the brain relates to the mind.
While I did not particularly enjoy the stress of Senior Projects, I did manage to gain
valuable insight into my future. However, I believe that it should be optional or, at the
very least, people with over three AP exams should be exempt. Thank you for sacrificing
your afternoon to see my project; it is greatly appreciated.
