Priya Tamura
Palo Alto High School Principal Brent Kline speaks to The Paly Voice on Tuesday afternoon about his decision to offer Multivariable Calculus at Paly as a Foothill College class next year. According to Kline, MVC should be taught by a college professor. “It's a college-level course,” Kline said. “I think it should be taught by a college professor who has that experience, who understands the expectations of this course.”
Palo Alto High School Principal Brent Kline plans to offer Multivariable Calculus as a Foothill College class — and not a district course — on campus next year, regardless of a school board vote next week that could add MVC as an official district course.
In a discussion with The Paly Voice on Tuesday afternoon in the Media Arts Center, Kline said MVC will not be offered as a Paly course, but instead as a Foothill College class either before, during or after school.
“It [the hypothetical official district course the board might approve on Tuesday] negatively affects the students who don’t take it,” Kline said. “It also does for students that do take it. Colleges don’t accept a high school-level multivariable calculus course as a college-level course, because it’s not — it’s a high school course. But if we maintain it for Foothill, then you can put it on your transcript, because you can put 20 units of outside courses on your transcript.”
According to Kline, one of the largest concerns about offering MVC as an official Paly course is that it would disadvantage students who don’t take it when applying to most out-of-state public colleges.
“College admission folks say that if MVC becomes a high school or dual enrollment class, it becomes the highest level,” Kline said. “That means that students not taking the course, which is 95% of our school, would be viewed as taking less than the most advanced option.”
Junior Leilani Chen said she believes there should be more math classes offered at Paly, just not ones that require students to be more advanced.
“For the 30-some students who do take MVC, they will be benefited when it comes to those out-of-state public schools,” Chen said. “For everyone else in the school, they are going to be seen as not taking as much rigor, as a student who is not taking as hard classes, who is not doing as much as they could have been, while MVC is literally a second-year college course.”
Senior Gavin Lin, who is currently taking MVC online, said the argument against offering the course as Paly’s own is weak because there are already many Paly courses that students are ineligible to take.
“There are so many courses at Paly that you can’t take, and it’s impossible to make a schedule that’ll fully max out every single course Paly has to offer,” Lin said. “It’s kind of ridiculous. … Saying that ‘Some students won’t be able to take the course’ can be said about any course, and that’s not a reason for any other courses to not be offered a Paly.”
Lin said one disadvantage of taking MVC off-campus or online is the timing.
“You have around a 20 minute turnaround time before the current multivariable class starts [at Gunn High School, three miles away], and so because that’s such a little amount of time, and there’s a lot of traffic when you’re going home, it’s caused me to be late even when I’m leaving five minutes early from school,” Lin said.
Although eligible to take MVC, senior Annika Chu said she decided not to take the course this year because it was not on Paly’s campus.
“The main reason that I chose not to take it this year was because I would have to go all the way to Gunn, or I’d have to take it virtually,” Chu said. “I think if I took it virtually, I wouldn’t be able to get the full amount of learning that I need, and I didn’t want to commute all the way to Gunn after school. … I think that it [offering MVC on campus] is going to help a lot of students who want to take it at Paly.”
According to Chen, there are other courses that would benefit more students if offered.
“We need to be adding to the range of math and not to the levels of math,” Chen said. “Math is not something that is linear learning. You don’t just go up each step, and it is just harder and more advanced math. There are things to learn in different areas, and that’s why we offer things like stats [AP Statistics], and why we could offer things like proofs [Intro to Proofs Honors].”