When I was in high school, I'd compare notes on my classroom experience in my AP classes with some of my non-AP friends, and I came to the conclusion that my classes were easier... except for math, I suppose, but I still viewed their work as an intolerably large amount of drudgery.
Their history/science/literature work consisted mostly of what I then termed "fun facts" and later came to refer to as "one-liners from Hell," useless and context-less facts that may have appeared only one time in the text and never in class discussion. Who cares what year Columbus was born in, or the precise year in which Longfellow pretended to live off the land in seclusion, or the exact atomic weight of Carbon-12?
And then my friends would say, "But... essays!", like it was a four-letter word. We each agreed that the other had the short end of the stick.
