“Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to get essential news about NYC’s public schools delivered to your inbox. To many New York City students, Advanced Placement Calculus feels impractical, full of information they won’t use in their day-to-day lives — though it’s become a status symbol for some high achievers. But reaching that status symbol has some significant consequences: AP Calculus has garnered a reputation for being a barrier to higher education. The class has become a gatekeeper, with many selective colleges requiring students to take the subject. Those who took it in high school are at an advantage, and schools with majority Black and Latino students tend to miss out. The number of such schools offering calculus has hovered under 40% over the past decade, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. P.S. Weekly producers Mateo Tang O’ Reilly, a junior at Central Park East High School, and Jasper Mallorca, a senior at High School of Art and Design, ask: Does AP calculus serve a purpose other than proving academic rigor to colleges? They explore the unseen value of calculus beyond the classroom. Mateo sits down with Dash Anderson, a Brooklyn high school math teacher who shares his experience teaching calculus in a way that brings the subject to life with real-world examples, from video games to “Moana.” P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between Chalkbeat and The Bell . It’s available on major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify . Reach us at PSWeekly@chalkbeat.org. New episodes drop on Thursdays. P.S. Weekly is made possible by generous support from The Pinkerton Foundation. Transcript Vox 1: So why did you sign up to take AP Calc? Vox 2: I chose AP Calculus because I’m interested in studying the sciences in college, and I’ve wanted to take the hardest math class. Vox 3: I know that junior year is like the most important year for college, so I wanted to take a really hard class. Vox 1: I’m going into meteorology and that’s a lot of math I’m gonna have to do, so I kinda just wanna get it over with. Jasper Mallorca: I took it because I want to do engineering in college, but it’s really hard, I’m not gonna lie. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: So you guys think you’re gonna use it in the future a lot, like AP calculus? Vox 6: I mean, I think it’s good knowledge to have. I don’t know if I’m gonna be using the math all that much in the future. Vox 7: I anticipate a lot of it’s gonna be forgotten, but I think, mm-hmm. Certain basic principles that I’m very grateful to have learned. I think I will retain, Vox 8: I mean, maybe I can, like, use it to, um, estimate how I’ll get to the bus on time or whatever in college, but I don’t know. Vox 7: After the AP test, I honestly feel like I’m not gonna use a lot of it. What I was focusing on, on what I would gain from the class is whether or not I wanted to do something within like engineering or even like as a math teacher. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Uh, final question. Would you recommend calculus to someone considering. Vox : Yeah, definitely Vox 7: don’t take the class. No, this is a trap. It’s a trap. It’s a trap. Vox 3: I would definitely recommend it, especially ‘cause it’s a requirement at most colleges and I know a lot of people wanna go to college, so I would definitely recommend it. Vox 1: So if you’re going into something that’s non-stem and you really want to, like, save your GPA wouldn’t recommend it. Vox 6: I disagree. I do think you should take AP calc. Because there’s a lot of fundamentals in calculus that are used in a lot of different fields, regardless of whether or not you take a STEM class. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Welcome back to P.S.Weekly, the sound of the New York City school system. I’m Mateo Tang-O’Reilly Tang Riley, a junior at Central Park East High School. Jasper Mallorca: and I’m Jasper Mallorca, a senior at Art Design High School. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: This week we’re talking about calculus in high schools. I know hearing calculus probably makes you want to click off. I think it’s boring too, but high schools and colleges make a really big deal about it, specifically AP calculus. Jasper Mallorca: Yeah. As someone who is in AP Calc right now, I definitely hear you. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: I did some research and found out that last year in 2025, roughly 446,000 students sat down to take an AP calc exam in a single school year, so almost half a million. Jasper Mallorca: How about in New York City, specifically? Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: New York City Public School Data from 2024 shows that the city hit a record high of students taking at least one AP exam. We don’t have the exact numbers for AP Calc, but it’s consistently one of the most popular AP classes, so we can assume that number is on the rise as well. Jasper Mallorca: Hmm. Really interesting. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: And that number is only going up. 2024 was officially declared an all time high for AP participation nationally, with nearly 3 million students taking 5.5 million exams. That’s a 7% jump from 2023 in a single year. Jasper Mallorca: How’d this all start? Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Advanced placement tests were first rolled out in 1954 in the middle of the Cold War. This was when educators and policy makers began to fear that high schools were not properly preparing students for the rigor of college coursework, and it was also a deliberate policy choice to help create more engineers and physicists for the Cold War. Our focus today is a class that used to be called AP Mathematics, and later in 1969 became what we know now as AP Calculus BC, which is the class I’m taking right now. Jasper Mallorca: Wow. So we’re taking this class that was justified like 70 years ago by the need to have more rocket scientists, when in reality most of the students taking it now are not even necessarily going into STEM fields. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Right. Jasper Mallorca: What made AP Calculus become viewed as highly as it is now? Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Well, we’re not really sure. Based on some research I did, I think college admissions viewed the class as applicable to many different fields and then began to associate good performance on the test with good performance in college and later in life. And it sort of became a one size fits all sort of thing. Also, when being test optional came into the conversation, colleges began to rely more on looking at students’ coursework. And since calculus had gained the reputation for showing academic rigor, it became an end all be all kind of class. Fast forward to today, college admissions are more competitive than they have ever been, and there’s kind of an unspoken rule that calculus is just one more hurdle for high school students to get through if they plan on going to a top college. Jasper Mallorca: I think that’s kind of why I joined AP Calculus. Yeah. I didn’t expect to be like the best student. Like I don’t have a crazy passion for math or anything, but the idea of pushing myself, not only for colleges to notice, but, like, just for myself, for me to be proud of something. And I don’t want to just take the easiest things, like I want to take the harder path, and I feel like after this year, I’m definitely gonna be proud of where I went with AP Calc, even if I don’t necessarily pass or get the highest grades. See, I think people take AP calculus to push themselves and hopefully to get to a good college, but it might not even align with what they might want to do. Like maybe taking statistics or computer science or something, even just more practical would maybe serve me better in the long run. I feel like there must be some sort of equity issue with this course as well. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Definitely being at a high school where you can take calculus means that if you take it at college, you’re at an advantage. However, a study from the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights says that only 38% of schools with majority black and Latino students offered the class. Jasper Mallorca: Wow. I also know there’s a larger debate happening where some schools are starting to offer things that are more quote-unquote applicable to real life, like statistics are financial literacy. I wonder if this might lead to high schools and colleges making less of a big deal about calculus. From my experience, I don’t really see that much of a real life gain from taking AP Calc. Something like LNE=1, seems so useless in real life. I also spend hours on AP Calc every night doing homework, accepting the fact that I won’t be learning from it. I don’t really know what I’ve gained from AP Calc besides a lot of headaches. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: I hear you on the headaches part. I think for me, Calculus is also kind of like a status thing, like at my school, like, oh, you’re an AP calc. Like that’s a big deal or whatever. Like you’re one of the smart kids. Jasper Mallorca: Definitely a status thing. A lot of people join for that. Yeah, and I, I’d be curious to know whether or not calculus has any value outside of, like, social status in high school, maybe general problem solving skills? Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: I think trying to answer that question is what drew me to the topic, because calc is easily the hardest class I’ve ever taken, and it feels unfairly hard because I can’t find any real world applications. And as of now, as someone who doesn’t really want to go into a STEM field, calc can feel sort of pointless. I think other people who also aren’t planning to do STEM in college feel the same way. Jasper Mallorca: I guess I’m curious why so many students, including us, are learning something so niche and challenging and honestly sort of random, that most people won’t ever use after they take the AP test. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: I’m with you on that one. I brought my curiosity about what the point of learning calculus is to Dash Anderson. He’s a math teacher at the Young Women’s Leadership School of Brooklyn, which is a public school in Bushwick. He’s also part of an organization called Math for America, which builds community among math and science teachers. He also recently presented a workshop for the organization on how to bring calculus to life. I went to Dash with an open mind to learn more about why calculus matters. What were some of the, like, hands-on things that I guess you learned and then you ended up teaching at the workshop? Dash Anderson : There was one about, uh, finding the volume of a piece of fruit. Um, we got, someone brought in some, like some gourds and other roundish shapes for the most part, and tried to calculate the volume using calculus and integrating. We did an activity about something called the Genie coefficient, which I had heard about in economics. It’s a way that they measure the level of inequality in different countries of income inequality. But I did not know until I did this workshop that it’s actually done by measuring the area between two curves. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Oh, we just learned how to do that. Dash Anderson : Yeah. So like the levels of income at different percentiles versus if it were all kind of evenly distributed and Yeah. You, you measure the area on this graph, and that’s used to determine this number that then measures inequality across different countries. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: I feel like a lot of students think that math is boring or pointless. Mm-hmm. How do you convince them otherwise in your day to day? Dash Anderson : One of the first days of class I start off, I show them the Little Mermaid and Moana side by side and we talk about how they’re similar. We talk about the animation and the fact that the Little Mermaid was hand animated. Somebody had to draw those frames one by one and draw the water in the waves and the droplets. And with Moana, like with a lot of 3D animated movies and CGI now. That relies on physics simulations. The reason that the water looks so realistic there is it is built on math. People had to go in and sort of recreate physics, recreate how water behaves in the real world using calculus and then they can just animate the character and the water reacts the way that water should. I mean, they’ve done that with snow and Frozen, they do that with hair and fur and fabric, and it’s part of why 3D animation has gotten so much better is because we now have computers that can do this math and do these calculations to recreate that kind of real world physics. I bring up that video games have been built on math, going all the way back to Pong. The original Mario experiences gravity when he jumps. Then today, if you’re playing, you know, grant theft auto, and you crash your car and fly through the windshield and bounce down the pavement, realistically, you can thank calculus for that as well. Basically, almost any STEM field has some kind of calculus connection or application within it, if you look for it. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Okay. I really have not looked for it, but I’m gonna start looking for it. So, let’s talk about your time as an educator. Can you lead me through a typical class taught by you? Is there anything you’d say you do differently than other math teachers to make your class more engaging. Dash Anderson : So there was a book that came out a while ago called Building Thinking Classrooms and Mathematics, and that focuses on basically making math more engaging, having students stand up and work at whiteboards instead of sitting at desks, working in random, small groups where they’re with different students every time and have to collaborate. Giving them more what they call thinking tasks that are kind of deeper questions that are more open-ended. They might have some real world application that they work through together and aren’t just a multiple choice question from the test. I try to do that, especially at the start of a topic. That’s kind of where things tend to be more engaging, where you can make those connections and those real world analogies. I try to, again, connect things to real life, to current events. I’ve been doing that a lot the last couple weeks now. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: What do you hope students can get out of a calculus class? Dash Anderson : The reason I proposed creating the class 10 years ago, we had our first class graduate in 2015. The main reason I wanted to offer the class was just to give students that exposure. So if they are gonna pursue stem, if they are gonna take calculus in college, they won’t be seeing it for the first time. If they can also pass the exam and earn the credit, that’s a bonus. But my main motivation was, yeah, preparing students for that calculus or more advanced math, they’re gonna have to see later on. That’s one reason, but even beyond that, I do think there are reasons to learn calculus, even if you’re not gonna pursue stem as with any other subject, you may not be using calculus every day, but it is in your life. It’s all around you. It’s in the physics of the world. It’s being used by people to make decisions that will affect you, and I think that’s enough reason to argue that everyone should have the opportunity to better understand these ideas for calculus or anything else that we teach in school. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: We’ll hear more from Dash after the break. Speaker 11: All our minds is a Team Life podcast produced by us for us Trailer : with PBS News, student reporting labs. We’re your hosts, Zach from Southern California. Speaker 11: And Helena from North Carolina. This year we’re taking you on an audio road trip. Trailer : You’ll hear stories from young people about what makes life surprising, weird, and wonderful all across the country. Speaker 11: Think audio essays about unique traditions. Trailer : Sound tours of cool locations. Speaker 11: Personal stories about life-changing moments. Trailer : And insightful interviews with local legends. Speaker 11: So buckle up and hop in. Trailer : Because you’re coming with us on the On Our Minds Road Trip. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Okay, so moving away from just calculus in general, what do you think is the most important thing for students to take away from your calculus class? Like it could be practical applications or understanding how to solve real world problems based on the material. Dash Anderson : They talk about spinning wool into yarn or I realize a more relevant example is like a can of silly string. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: The candy? Dash Anderson : No, like a can of silly string that you spray on someone. I feel like maybe that’s been banned now. You don’t see much of this. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Yeah, I, I haven’t heard of that. Dash Anderson : Anyway. You used to buy this stuff, silly string, that was like goo in a can, but you spray it and it turns into this length of this like plasticy string that was terrible for the environment. That idea, if you have this clump of stuff and you wanna know if I turn this into a length or a distance, what would that area kind of become? Or if I knew how much string came outta the can, could I figure out how big that blob was originally? So if they can understand that relationship, then I think that’s both what’s beautiful about calculus is those ideas. But I also think then if they get to college, if they pursue a stem field. That’s what they’re gonna retain is that understanding more than their memorization of L’Hopital’s Rule or those other kind of little bits that they have to learn just for the test. But my main goal is just will they come away with that sort of deeper understanding of why these ideas work in the first place? Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Yeah, I would like to learn that along with L’Hopital’s Rule is like lowkey easy. So like, I’ll take it. So for students who have no plans to become engineers or any profession that uses advanced math, what do you think the benefits of a calculus class are? Dash Anderson : It’s true that once you get beyond like eighth grade algebra, one level math, you’re not learning a lot that’s gonna come up in your everyday life. But that’s okay, that’s the case for your other classes too, right? You’re not necessarily doing literary analysis or explaining mitosis or the seven years war, whatever. A lot of what we learn in school is not directly applicable to our lives, but it’s still valuable. It’s still part of our shared knowledge. It’s a way of discovering what you want to pursue, right? You’re not gonna know what you wanna do as a career until you’ve seen it at least a little bit, and that’s part of why we want to introduce students to all these things. So I think there’s value there, and. As I was saying, I think with a lot of this more advanced math, even if you’re not using it in your life, somebody is like there are jobs out there that are relying on these things that do affect you in different ways, or it’s, yeah, the space program or disease control, or finance or whatever else. There are ways that these things get used, and if it does affect you, then. I do think it’s worth understanding. Do you play a lot of video games? Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: I play like Roblox, that’s it. Dash Anderson : Okay. Roblox is the one I’ve kind of stayed away from. I don’t know exactly what the game is there. But a lot of the most popular games recently, things like Minecraft or Star Dew Valley or Bellatro, have this element that’s economic, where you are collecting some resource like gold or experience points or gems, and then you’re spending it on something. An upgrade or a building that will allow you to then collect those gems faster. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Oh, okay. Dash Anderson : And so that’s already economics. And then you often have to decide, am I going to buy this upgrade now or save up for this better one? And will the bigger increase be worth the time I had to wait to save for it? And when you’re making that decision, that becomes a calculus problem. What you’re really thinking about is if this line represents the rate at which I am acquiring gold. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Ah, okay. Dash Anderson : And I can either bend that line up a little bit now or a lot later. The question is, which of those shapes has the greater area underneath and therefore represents the most gold that I can acquire? The fastest way to get to whatever that next goal is. So any game like that that has that sort of, yeah, resource management element you are. Doing some amount of calculus when you’re making those types of choices. If, if you want to, and even more kind of everyday example. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: That’s a really good everyday example. All right, so if calculus gave no advantage whatsoever to students in terms of college applications or like people who want to go into STEM fields, what do you think the class would look like in schools? Dash Anderson : This has been another discussion teachers have been having recently, could calculus ideas just be introduced earlier in math in general, if you weren’t bringing all that AP stuff along with it, and it [00:18:00] was just about thinking about the rate of change. Can you measure the rate of change of a curve and not a straight line? And how do you do that? Can you draw a tangent line to a curve? I think a middle schooler could draw a tangent line if you explained it to them. So I think if calculus weren’t thought of as this college level course and this kind of gateway to all these other things. I think the basic ideas could just be part of the general math curriculum and be accessible to everyone without having to necessarily take an AP class. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Why do you think it’s acceptable for people to say, I’m not a math person, but it’s not acceptable for people to say, I’m not a reading person. Dash Anderson : I mean that, that’s also a good question. You often hear about literacy across the curriculum and that everyone should be teaching reading, which is true. There’s reading in every subject. There’s a lot of reading and math, but we’ve also talked about numeracy across the curriculum and that your English and social studies classes can bring in math in a lot of ways and make those connections the other direction. It is unfortunate, especially when students hear and adults say, I’m not a math person, because that puts the idea in their head that they might just not be a math person. And if math is hard, it’s just not for them. They can give up and do something else. So yeah, I think for the why, I think it’s just our culture and that we, we think about reading in math, in numeracy in different ways. We accept the fact that people can say they’re not a math person, but why that’s the case, I think is maybe too deep other than the fact that, I mean, reading is something that you do to some extent throughout your life and every day just to survive. And with math, once you get past at least kind of the middle school level, it doesn’t have that sort of application of like, I need this just to go to the supermarket and, and buy groceries. The math you learn in calculus and the things you learn in a lot of your classes are not going to be used by you every single day. They’re not life skills necessarily, but if they’re in your life, if they’re affecting you, if they’re being used by other people to make those decisions that have an effect on you. I think everybody should have that opportunity to learn more about those things, to understand the world better. And I would love for calculus to have more of that place, even if that means maybe getting away from. The standardized curriculum and exam that it’s currently attached to. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Alright. Thank you for coming Dash. Dash Anderson : Thank you for having me. I love talking about this stuff all the time, and I’m glad to be given this opportunity. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: I really didn’t know that calculus was in video games and animation like that was really cool to me. Jasper Mallorca: Yeah, I mean. Who would’ve thought it would be like Moana? I feel like the movie just has nothing to do with math. It’s kind of mind blowing. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Yeah. I really never thought of calculus being in non STEM fields. Like I really appreciate, like, the arts and everything, and the fact that calculus has a place there, I guess was pretty eye-opening. I think even outside of the applications of calculus that Dash was talking about, I feel like. I have to recognize that he’s like one in a million math teachers that are really incorporating this into teaching calculus, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that that’s calc teachers’ faults. I feel like the AP curriculum is really limiting in terms of what you can teach and how you can teach it, because it’s really all about that test. Jasper Mallorca: I think kids would like to have a teacher like Dash, you know, that could actually show them what they’re doing and like how it’s actually useful in life other than just memorizing formulas that they’re not gonna know in like two years. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: You know, I feel like teaching to a test really just sucks all of the joy out of the class because everyone knows that what you’re learning is for one purpose only, and then it’s like three hours of your life. And then when those three hours are over you don’t really have a reason to remember any of those things. It just doesn’t really create a happy feeling. Jasper Mallorca: I think the best thing you probably learned was how to problem solve better and just in life. But like it’s good that Dash could show them, like what they’re doing. It maybe could inspire ‘em more too. To, like, learn better. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Yeah. Like even though I don’t want to go into animation or any of the applications he was talking about that weren’t STEM fields. I think just knowing that. What I’m learning in class has a place in things that I have a stake in, it was good to know, like I appreciated that. That’s all for today on P.S. Weekly. P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between The Bell and Chalkbeat made possible by generous support from the Pinkerton Foundation. Producers for this episode were me, Mateo Tang-O’Reilly Tang O’Reilly, Jasper Mallorca: and me Jasper Mallorca. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Our senior producer for the show is Maria Robins-Somerville, and our technical director is Jake Lummus. The executive editors are Amy Zimmer and Taylor McGraw. Jasper Mallorca: Additional production and reporting support was provided by Mira Gordon, Sabrina DuQuesnay, Zana Halili, and Katelyn Melville, and our friends at Chalkbeat. Mateo Tang-O’Reilly: Music is from APM and the jingle you heard at the beginning of this episode was created by the one and only Erica Huang. Jasper Mallorca: Thanks so much for listening and see you next time. We make transcripts available for our episodes as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.
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