This year, in lieu of making AP students fill out their pre-registration forms during class time, the TJ administration has sought to develop a more efficient method instead: Asking every student in the entire junior grade to spend their lunch last Monday, April 22nd to fill out paperwork for all their AP class registrations. Well, better said than done.

Indeed it makes plenty of sense to knock it all out in one day, rather than asking each individual class to sacrifice a day’s worth of instruction dedicated to filling out paperwork. But stuffing the lecture hall to the brim with students, and exiling trickling slackers to the lonely outside classrooms, felt the opposite of efficient. At first, it wasn’t all too bad. I walked in and searched for my name among the sea of packets of AP-registration papers, and found mine neatly paperclipped together. I grabbed it and sat down at a table. Then the trouble started.

First, the written instructions were convoluted and incomplete. They were pretty much deemed useless as soon as the teachers began screaming directions into the mic. No one was listening; Everyone was busying themselves with filling out housekeeping info such as name and address. Maybe I’m just a visual learner, but shouting a string of unrelated instructions one after another doesn’t help me finish this faster. At one point the teacher asked everyone to look up as she pointed to a ridiculously tiny portion of the AP registration packet. How did she expect us to see that?

The lecture hall felt stuffy from the hot breath of teenagers crammed shoulder-to-shoulder at the uncomfortably close tables. No one knew what was going on and no one was finished when lunch was over. We were well into JLC by the time students submitted their paperwork and headed out. We turned in each AP test paperwork to their respective bins, which were inconveniently placed on the ground. This meant needing to bend down and crane your neck to identify the label to the appropriate bin. Seemingly insignificant, but every crane of the neck meant another five seconds of everyone waiting to get out! This further fueled my frustration with the whole ordeal.

Next year I will be disappointed to see the administration execute this same disaster. Either return to last year’s method or devise something new.