Just one week after the Palo Alto High School administration committed not to offer a new college-level math class as a standard high school course, the Palo Alto Unified School District Board of Education prepares to review and possibly approve that course, alongside others, at its meeting on Tuesday.

Palo Alto High School math teacher Daniel Nguyen said he is proposing the Multivariable Calculus course to address the desire among eligible students.

“I know a lot of students want to learn the material,” Nguyen said. “We ran a survey at Paly, and we counted almost 40 kids who want to take the course as [a] dual enrollment [Paly course] during the school day. The numbers at [Henry M.] Gunn [High School] are probably similar, so there’s a lot of demand for the course.”

PAUSD board member and soon-to-be vice president Rowena Chiu said MVC is particularly contentious because Paly’s internal educational board voted against its adoption.

“It [MVC] did not pass Ed Council,” Chiu said. “From that point of view, I think there’s a lot of tension being paid toward Multivariable Calculus because, although it is true that the board has historically not turned away a course that a teacher has brought, there have been few courses that have had this level of controversy attached to them.”

Keeping this in mind, Chiu said her stance on MVC has not changed since her campaign. Chiu said she is in support of broadening the range of courses available to all students.

“We don’t need to place artificial constraints on students who are qualified to do multivariable calculus, badly want it and think of it as critical to their college application process,” Chiu said. “My hope is that they [PAUSD’s math courses] will meet the needs of students who are at different places on the math spectrum.”

Paly Principal Brent Kline said one of the disadvantages of offering MVC as a high school course is that it disadvantages students not in MVC when applying to certain colleges.

“The second you turn it [MVC] into a high school course, then that becomes the highest level [math] course,” Kline said. “If you don’t get to multivariable calculus, you’re not reaching the highest-level math course that Paly offers.”

Daniel Hahn, the Henry M. Gunn High School math teacher proposing the Intro to Proofs H course, said he wants to make the transition to college-level mathematical reasoning easier for students.

“If you look at the transition from high school to college math, one of the big difficulties that people have is that in high school, you spend a lot of time solving equations and graphing stuff,” Hahn said. “When you get to college, the math conversation changes into arguments and justifications and proof, and a lot of people have trouble jumping across that gap. I did, too.”

Nguyen, on the other hand, said he thinks there is a mismatch in terms of demand between the two courses.

“In that survey that I gave, from the students who are currently in BC [Calculus] and who might take MVC or Intro to Proofs next year, 39 of those students said they wanted to take MVC, only seven kids said they wanted to take the Intro to Proofs course,” Nguyen said.

According to Nguyen, the concern that students will feel disadvantaged if they don’t take MVC is not prevalent in other schools that offer the course on campus during school hours.

“I don’t know how true that [students being at a disadvantage] is,” Nguyen said. “If we look at Mountain View Los Altos Unified School District, they have the [MVC] course. I talked to a math teacher there, and I was like ‘How’d it go when you started offering that course?’ … She said the teachers didn’t understand the question, because there wasn’t a lot of drama. There wasn’t a big issue with any changes in how students felt.”

Junior Akansha Chatterjee said she wouldn’t be able to take MVC next year if the course were before or after school.

“I do cross country and track, and that goes on for basically the entire year, and practices start right after school,” Chatterjee said. “If we had a class right after school, that would just be incredibly inconvenient for me. I wouldn’t actually be able to take it. If we had a class before school, like we all know, school can be pretty stressful, and people are usually up late at night trying to finish homework assignments.”

Senior Diana Senderzon, who is currently taking MVC at De Anza College, said that commuting to class is very difficult.

“I have to leave class [at Paly] early to make it on time, and I have to get through the traffic every single day that I have the class,” Senderzon said. “We used to have it [as a Paly course], so we should just have it again.”

Sophomore Beinan Ren said he knows many students who want to take more advanced math after finishing AP Calculus BC.

“I know a lot of people in my class right now are juniors, and there are some sophomores,” Ren said. “I’d say that maybe makes up 40% of the class. Next year, if they can only take AP Stats, some of them might not want to. I think having more options is a great thing.”

Hahn said that because Intro to Proofs is a different field of math than calculus, students could take it as a senior while taking BC Calculus.

“It’s actually open and accessible to everybody, and so Proofs is able to fulfill the things that we need that multivariable calculus also would fill, but it comes with none of the negative benefits of increasing competition and stress,” Hahn said.

More broadly, Chiu said she is hoping PAUSD will take advantage of its resources to pave the way toward a more extensive range of class choices.

“PAUSD is a well-resourced district with a lot of very capable students, but very importantly, also a wide diversity of students who learn very differently and who are interested in many different things,” Chiu said. “As a district that is a leader in many aspects, I think it is our responsibility to offer the broadest range of choice possible. I don’t just mean for maths, but for many other academic pathways, and frankly for non-academic pathways [too].”

Nguyen said students must advocate for themselves if they want MVC to be offered at Paly.

“They [administrators] listen to students more than many other stakeholders,” Nguyen said. “So, students who want this course offered? It’s upon you to take the steps necessary to make your voices heard.”