January 2026 proved to be the beginning of a turbulent semester, and I realized I hadn’t even written anything about it. I guess I needed to process it all. First, Oxford suffered through Winter Storm Fern (a.k.a. Icepocalypse). Many residents went without power, water, and / or heat for weeks. For 6.5 days my neighbors and I were without power and heat but we did have water. Our building principal out in the county was out of everything for 18 days! There was so much tree damage that the din of chainsaws was only replaced several months later by the din of cicadas. We did not go to school for 11 days. I had just started teaching AP Calculus on a 4×4 block schedule — and essentially missed 22 instructional days on a traditional 7-period day.

But there were other things that set this semester apart — I played the role of Ms Norbury in our school’s production of the musical Mean Girls. That amazing experience is a blog post in and of itself. Our youngest child graduated from high school, so we became empty nesters. And, I retired (but am going back to teach AP Calculus in January — long story… another blog post).

But the reason for this post was to let everyone know that when the CollegeBoard took down the review videos in March 2026, just 7 weeks before the AP exams, Mark and I scrambled to produce our own to fill the void. Here’s how the work dynamic goes: I beg Mark to do it and he acquiesces. He had to learn a lot about starting a YouTube channel, editing videos, etc. The videos are not hyper-edited — just enough to pare down unnecessary chit chat.

We call our channel Another Practice Schoolroom. For Season 1 we were focused on releasing 8 solid review videos, 2 for multiple choice questions and 6 for free response questions. We knew that the most ambitious students would watch whether they were assigned or not, and that other students would watch because their teachers assigned them. About 20% of my students would have watched them on their own so I required ALL of my students to watch them, printing and copying the associated documents available with each video. I am happy to report that their pass rate was 100%! (Note: This was not an experiment so no causation can be shown. LOL.)

Season 2 is under construction and we are rolling out videos as we make them. Our theme this season is chapter or unit reviews. So we did limits, derivatives, chain rule, and most recently recorded a video on the contextual applications of the derivative. We will likely do two more videos on applications before we turn our attention to antiderivatives and their applications.

To date we have approximately 2K subscribers and 136K views. Honestly, I’d be happy to have way fewer views than that because even if our videos only help a few students and/or teachers, it’s worth it.