Durham Academy Magazine 

With New Advanced Curriculum, ‘DA Can Be Everything That It Can Be’

Story by Melody Guyton Butts | Photography by Kate Auger & Michael Branscom

It marks the most dramatic shift to the Upper School curriculum in decades, representing a commitment to uphold Durham Academy’s well-earned reputation for academic excellence and maintain its high standards for a dynamic, relevant, engaging student experience. With the introduction of eight Advanced (ADV) courses in 2023–2024 — the result of years of planning — DA Upper School has turned the page to a new chapter in rigor and authentic learning. 

Following this successful pilot, DA has fully sunset Advanced Placement (AP) courses — which, for decades, were viewed as the pinnacle of subject mastery, but have since come to merely represent a student’s skill in rote memorization, with a constraining syllabus that limits teachers’ ability to go beyond a prescribed mountain of material at breakneck speed. In transitioning away from APs, Durham Academy students and teachers have said clearly and in unison: We can do better.

The Upper School’s new ADV curriculum is an internally designed, academically rigorous set of courses that emphasize depth over breadth, global relevance and independent problem-solving. In ADV courses, students must synthesize complex information and apply their knowledge in real-life situations — resulting in long-lasting learning and skills that are applicable throughout their academic and professional careers.

The Upper School is offering 52 ADV courses — from Machine Learning and AI to Medicine and Malady — in 2024–2025.

So, in practice, what are the advantages of the shift to the new Advanced curriculum? 

To find out, we convened a roundtable of Upper School students and teachers who have taken or taught both AP and ADV courses — their experiences straddling both sides of the transition affording them a unique perspective. Students assembled for that early-May lunchtime meeting represented 40 AP enrollments and 12 ADV enrollments over the course of their time in the Upper School. 

The following highlights from their discussion — with dialogue so impassioned that late notes were required for the participants’ next classes — make clear that ADV courses are succeeding in satisfying students' appetite for challenge and enduring, meaningful knowledge.

Lily Zellman ’24  
The main difference for me [between AP and ADV courses] is who I'm taking the class for, or for what purpose I'm learning. The ADV classes are way more specialized, and I'm signing up because that is a subject that I'm very interested in. I know for me personally, in APUSH [AP U.S. History] and in AP Euro [European History], even though it's not about that, I'll always squeeze in something that's about women and gender, anyway. So that's why the ADV [Historical Approaches to] Women and Gender class was perfect for me. But I'm taking that because that's an area that I'm really interested in, that I really want to flourish in and learn more about. When I'm learning in AP Euro and other AP classes, it's like the College Board [which develops and administers exams and curricula for AP courses] is the big man above. And I'm just trying to do something so that the College Board can just like, let me live [laughs]. I'm trying to prove something to someone else that I don't feel like I need to prove to myself.

Max Tendler ’24  
AP Art History — and it's specifically bad for Art History, but it's an epidemic across a lot of AP courses — essentially revolves around memorization. Memorization is THE skill, as opposed to deep comprehension. I will say, Adair [longtime English and art history teacher Jordan Adair, who retired at the conclusion of the 2023–2024 school year] taught it in a way that made it, ironically, less about the AP, and that was more interesting. He was like, “I'm not going to teach the AP curriculum to a T” — it was more what he wanted to talk about and what he felt was important, and that made it better. 

I still had hundreds, I think, of flashcards. Contrast that to Advanced Historical Approaches to Women and Gender, which was far more akin to research and in-depth analysis — which, I will say, suited me very well, [but] I think was a difficult learning curve for other people. I enjoyed the class because it was something that I was incredibly interested in. It was very specific, and not necessarily niche, but a focused course, which was nice in its own right. It was sort of the polar opposite of [AP] Art History.

Michael Hansen ’24  
[In AP Art History,] the best moments of teaching that [Adair] would have and the most meaningful and interesting things that we would talk about would be when we weren't trying to memorize. Because you have to know the artist and what year it was painted for like 250 different required works, and you need to know two or three things about them. I thought the best part of that class was when we got the farthest away from what the exam was about. 

And I think the same thing is true for history classes like AP Euro. I remember this year, some of the things that we did that had relatively little relation to the exam were, for example, we had a seminar on a book called The Many-Headed Hydra about a Marxist history about pirates and how they were kind of like proto-socialist societies back in the day and presented an alternative form of governance. And I thought that that was one of the most interesting ideas that we talked about all year, versus memorizing the eight key themes across the AP exam.

Claire Hong ’24
I found the pacing of the classes to be very different. … In AP Chemistry, you still have to go very much on the schedule, and I know there are a lot of people who were struggling with one concept at the beginning. But in math and science, if you don't understand a core concept at the beginning, it's very hard to catch up later. In ADV Geometries, when we don't understand some of the main concepts, we get that time to learn it.

Sarah Muir ’24
The content that you learn in APs is standardized, but that also means that the skills that you're supposed to be strengthening and working on are very standardized. ... In a class like ADV Math Modeling, there were very diverse strengths that people brought to the class and into our projects. They were able to strengthen those [skills] and were able to develop other accessory strengths, but they were really able to focus on what they wanted to do. And so it was a diverse group of students who were able to work on these very kind of complicated projects in a way that really let them shine in a way that an AP class never would have.

Caitlin Travers ’24  
In AP BC Calculus, “churning” is a good word for it; every day, [math teacher Jarrod Jenzano] would whip out his iPad, and we'd go through the lesson, and then at the end of the week, we'd have a homework quiz, and then you'd have a test just to make sure that you have everything. And you'd do that every single week until the AP exam at the end — and you still couldn’t even finish all of it. ... In [ADV] Calculus, … I feel like he has a little more room to breathe. 

Dr. Courtney Monahan
Upper School Latin and history teacher
If I were primarily focused on getting people good grades on the AP exams, I would have to do things that are antithetical to what I think you should teach in high school: I would teach memorization; I would tell them to read English translations and memorize them; I would tell them that they should spend less time on learning their Latin reading skills, and more time just going through textbooks and taking notes. And I think that for the quality of students that I have, that is a waste of their time. … 

But then, if we turn to what I'm going to get to do next year in Latin, and what I've gotten the chance to do this year [teaching ADV Historical Approaches to Women and Gender and ADV Ancient Technologies], I'm not so worried about communicating specific content. And I get to do what I think is going to make you all much better students and interesting people in the future, which is really work on skills that allow you to be flexible, and to adapt those skills to whatever you want to study instead of the specific thing that the College Board wants you to study. … And so it becomes a much more joyful experience as a teacher, and I feel like I have more integrity in terms of my teaching.

Forrest Hinton
Upper School math teacher 
Some of you have noted the problem with the AP curriculum is that there's just too much and too little time, right? I think the AP folks at the College Board get all these professors together around the country, and they can't agree on what should be in a course — “Well, I think we should teach that” or “I think this” — so they just cram it all in there. And they say, well, you high school teachers have to teach it all, even though at a real university-level course, you wouldn't cover all that content. 

We still teach the core calculus content in ADV courses, but we don't have to hit the Lagrange error bound unnecessarily or the 10th series convergence test that AP requires. And we can spend more time doing real calculus, like how did [Isaac] Newton and [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz use calculus to solve physics problems? Or how could you apply this to economics, looking at marginal cost rates and stuff like that? So I think we have more opportunity to actually use calculus in authentic ways. Rather than just doing topic, topic, topic, test, test, test.

Zellman  
I'm so biased towards the ADV classes. I love them. And I'm so glad that those [ADV Historical Approaches to Women and Gender and ADV Ancient Technologies] were available to me. The ADV classes for me, personally, have done a lot. I would not have known about archaeology if it weren't for that class, and now I'm going to a school based on the fact that they have an archaeology major, and so I'm really grateful about that. 

Travers
[In ADV history classes] I studied Tang Dynasty women's fashion for a semester. And I just did a fun project on rice cultivation in Thailand. That is just not a thing you can do in an AP course. And I really appreciate that, because I can talk about those two specific topics for a really long time.

Muir  
I'm glad [going forward, students] get to take these classes that are taught by the same teachers who have such brilliance in what they do, but are [also] going to be able to touch on really intersectional topics. Profe Simón [Spanish teacher Liliana Simón]  talked to me when we were in Peru [for a 2023 Cavalier Capstone] about how she's going to teach a Shakira class that talks about Shakira's political issues and also her business ventures ...

Tendler  
Oh, what I would do to take that class.

Hansen  
At least in the conversations I'm having with juniors and sophomores, there seems to be a lot more excitement about taking ADV Math Modeling and ADV Revolutions and ADV Nations and Nationalism and ADV Postmodernism than there ever was for taking, like, AP U.S. History.

Muir  
The only AP class that I have enjoyed because of the curriculum would be AP Research, and that’s because the curriculum barely existed. … It was so free, and I was able to study a niche topic that interested me. And my classmates were studying niche topics that interested them, and I got to see them get to investigate something that they were really passionate about. It was like a little community where we got to see one another shining.

Dr. Rob Policelli
Upper School history teacher, dean of curriculum & leader of the Advancing Beyond APs initiative
That's not like any other AP. That is much more like an ADV class, and the success of that course let us know we could expand that model further.

Muir
It's a really good sign for the future. … I think that DA can be everything that it can be with Advanced classes in a way that it couldn't with the AP curriculum.  

 

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