“Why not offer more BC sections in place of excess AB sections?”
Good question. I need to get in touch with the counseling dept. to ask. My guess is that demand for BC is right around/just over 60 kids and they don’t have the budget to offer 2/3 -full courses in our district. We are looking at having him take BC online concurrently and then take the BC test next spring rather than AB, if a spot doesn’t open up.
This has all been great perspective. The other factor is that I have been told that there is a great deal of Calc in the AP Physics class that will also be taken next year. I guess that helps keep the Calculus skills up to speed but probably does not help fill gap in what would be missed in Calc BC.
At my D19 school the honors path (until the new math changes) was Algebra 1 in 7th, geometry in 8th, Algebra II in 9th, honors pre-cal in 10th and if you get an A both semesters you move on to Calc BC. If don’t you move on to Calc AB. Lemonlulu, all the top math students take Stats senior year. Some may take Multivariable Calc at the community college, but most don’t and they are accepted everywhere.
Back when I was in high school, the good math students took algebra 1 in 8th grade. They got to calculus in 12th grade. BC was the only calculus course offered (one section). A few years later, a second section of calculus was offered, which was AB.
This was not an elite high school. It was a public school where about a third went to 4 year college (mostly state schools) with some more going to the community college.
My daughter took AB & BC in high school, received 5’s on both. She opted to start in Calc 2 over Calc 3 and still struggled tremendously at ND this year. She is an engineer major. BC over Stats, definitely.
How can you have a high school math teacher who is not qualified to take BC Calc? It’s a first year college level math course. That’s crazy.
That’s what I was wondering, since a high school math teacher should have majored in math or similar in college, plus whatever additional teacher credentialing course work is needed.
^^our HS offers a dual-enrollment with the local Cal State, so the Calc teacher must have a Master’s in math. Of course, our district does not offer AB, only BC. (As you have mentioned many times, ucb, it makes little sense to take the top math kids in the HS and put them into a slower math track – AB – in Junior year.)
At our school, AB is a requirement to take BC. No one gets to take BC without taking AB first (and making either an A or B in the class).
@ucbalumnus High school teachers are theoretically qualified to teach AP calculus, but in practice, not many have the actual higher order math skills to do so. The Praxis 2 exam to be a certfied math teacher covers only very basic calculus. And the older teachers had even easier requirements .Many of my math students going on to become high school teachers squeaked by their theoretical math classes. It’s crazy, I know.
yes at our kids’ high school, the older teachers are not (practically) qualified to teach AP calc. Fortunately they hired a couple younger teachers who were very good. Usually one would think it’s a perk to teach the highest level class (thus those with most seniority would get it). But not in practice at least in our experience. To effectively teach calculus, you have to know it inside and out. Math major or not, that isn’t a guarantee with many math teachers, unfortunately.
Seems like if your kid or some other prospective college student is considering a career as a high school math teacher, suggesting that s/he learn calculus inside and out could improve his/her marketability if there are many high schools struggling to find teachers who can teach calculus.
I know at my D’s school lots of top students avoid AP Calc like the plague - it’s hard, teachers not great, and it can be a GPA crusher. Many move from Honors Precalc to AP Stats, and protect their GPA.
My D took AP Calc AB this year and hopes to be done with college math as she is not STEM.
Yes, definitely. A while back I had a couple of good students who got placements very quickly. I was so happy. Then, a couple of years later, they emailed me to ask for rec letters for the software jobs and grad school they were applying to. One got the job, the other went to grad school (not teaching related) and both left teaching .
@theloniusmonk I’m probably biased by my own experience. Physics courses are different at different schools, and even different within the same school. I took the most advanced physics sequence at Stanford, taken by only about 30 students per year, and I can say that we definitely needed to know how to compute complicated path and surface integrals. Prior calculus BC and physics at the AP level were both prerequisites for that course. My daughter at a highly selective university also says she benefitted from taking Calculus III before her E&M course, which was in the track designed for engineers. But I agree that the vast majority of physics courses probably are not that way.
In many colleges, multivariable calculus is listed as a co-requisite to the calculus-based physics course that contains electricity and magnetism. Perhaps not optimal (preferable to have multivariable calculus as a prerequisite instead), but it may need to be that way for prerequisite sequencing purposes for physics and engineering majors if the college does not want to assume that all physics and engineering majors can start in calculus 2 or higher.
Our high school does Calc AB then Calc BC in successive years. But you don’t need to do pre-Calc first, so Calc AB is the faster track after Geometry (usually 9th, a few do in it 8th or the summer before 9th grade) and Algebra II/Trig (usually 10th). So the typical faster sequence would be Geo, Alg2/Trig, Calc AB, Calc BC. A regular paced sequence would be Geo, Alg2/Trig, Pre-Calc, Calc AB (and there are several slower pathways that end with Pre-Calc or the regular Alg2 course). The most accelerated sequence would be Alg2/Trig, Calc AB, Calc BC then dual enrollment MVC/LA. I think 1 kid in the last 4 years skipped directly from Alg2/Trig to Calc BC, then had two years of dual enrollment.
Our school as kids choose between AB or BC after they take pre-calc. If you take AB junior year, you are not allowed to take BC since our BC class is AB and BC material combined. So…the kids who took AB junior year take AP Stats as seniors. It’s not ideal for a future engineering student, though, because they need to go back to calc once they get to college and they won’t have taken calc in over a year then.
The BC calc juniors take an honors Multivariable Calc class senior year. That’s the ideal situation for a future engineering student. AP Stats is really seen as ‘extra’ math class for most kids. They would take it as elective on top of taking their regular math sequence which includes Geometry, Algebra 2/Trig, Pre-Calc, Calc. It’s only the handful of juniors taking AB Calc then end up with no more calc to take senior year so they take Stats as their main math class.
All this to say that you should continue calc and take BC. If you have an extra class period available and love math, then take AP Stats as well.
Re: #37
Wouldn’t any student reaching calculus in 11th grade be a top student in math who would prefer to go full speed ahead with BC, at least if s/he intends to study something math-based in college?
Every high school and every kid is different. At our public high school , you had to take a full year of AB, then a full year of BC. That’s just the way it was and older kid did that, 5’s on both AP tests. Younger kid didn’t want to take calculus in high school at all, wanted to take AP stats instead and I saw no point in arguing with him. He ended up graduating Magna Cum Laude in engineering so go figure!