On a recent sunny Tuesday morning in the Hill House dining hall, two students enrolled in American Studies were reportedly sighted making small talk among a group of fifth-formers when, at approximately 7:40am, a realization dawned on one of the students: he had not mentioned Amstuds since the night before—a full ten hours earlier.

Following this revelation, the student began sweating profusely, his hands trembling and his eyes losing focus, as he searched for someone to whom he could mention the course. According to further detailed reports, the fifth-former was on the verge of fainting until he made eye contact with a girl across the table and seized his opportunity, unreservedly complaining about the length of the previous night’s reading on Jim Crow.  Immediately after she rolled her eyes and scoffed at his pretension, natural order reaffirmed itself: miraculously, the student’s symptoms instantly began to fade.

Just one in a string of similar close calls, this event calls attention to a poll conducted by The Choate News which found that, in a survey including ninety percent the Choate community, the average Amstuds student is reported to mention the class at least once every 43 minutes. (This statistic accounts for both waking and asleep.)

At the same time as the incident, SRP student Kris Nishodami ’17, sitting nearby, had been in the process of mentioning her struggle in the class for the second dozenth time that morning, successfully meeting her quota before her first period of the day had even begun.  Witnesses stated that Nishodami, who had been quietly observing the scene from her own table, was shell-shocked to realize that her rival specialty course classmate had gone for such a lengthy period without mentioning their shared course.

Finishing her fourth coffee of the morning, Nishodami commented, “I am shocked, disappointed, appalled, disgruntled, and saline that a fellow academic weapon such as myself would stoop to such a level of human indecency as to not proclaim their intellectual superiority at every chance.”

As word spread through the Amstuds underground of the recent mention—or lack thereof—of the course, the debate over designating specific ‘AP students’ consequently reemerged.  Regarded widely as two of the most rigorous courses at Choate, SRP and Amstuds seem fittingly to elicit the most regular mentions of all high-level courses. However, many still question whether students in less demanding yet still ostensibly “Advanced Placement” courses deserve a similar title to that of some of their peers. Jenny Maloney ’17 commented, “When you have classes like APES (Environmental Science), it just isn’t fair to give all AP students the same condescending bragging rights as those in harder classes.” Most Amstuds students agreed, archly calling classes such as AP Microeconomics “little more than academic sinecures” before smiling, since they had the chance to use the word ‘sinecure’ outside of class.

At press time, Spice Woktwell ‘17, a student enrolled in both Amstuds and SRP, was seen foaming at the mouth as his vocal apparatuses tried impossibly to mention both courses at once.