Students pursue mathematics in community college courses

If a 95-minute lecture leaves you exhausted, imagine attending a 2-hour college lecture on Lagrange multipliers and vector integration.

Senior Chris Jones experienced such a class two times a week when he took a multivariable calculus course at West Valley College this past fall.

“The classes were not outstandingly hard,” Jones said, though he did find them “harder than Saratoga’s classes since [the multivariable calculus class] typically did two or three lessons in a 2-hour lecture block.”

Senior Alissa Zhang also studied multivariable calculus in the fall, but she took the course at De Anza College instead.

“The material wasn’t too hard, and followed well from Calculus BC,” Zhang said. “It is different from high school, though, so that takes some adjustment. Our homework doesn’t count for any credit, so my grade depends entirely on tests, quizzes, and the final.

Zhang, who attended classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the early evening, also had to adjust to a new teaching style.

“It’s a somewhat different style of teaching, as each class is basically a 2-hour lecture,” Zhang said. “It was a 12-week, 24-class course, and there were four tests and five quizzes in addition to the final. So we spent a lot of time taking tests and quizzes and going over them.”

Jones also observed fundamental differences between the format of high school classes and that of his college course.

“There was not the type of review and help that we had in Calculus BC,” Jones said. “Although we did do a little bit of homework review in [multivariable calculus], it didn’t feature explanations so much as ‘Here’s how you do this.’”

For Jones, reviewing homework questions in his Calculus BC class had been “a fantastic help, [because he] could get help from other students.”

Taking courses with college students was also an interesting experience for Jones. In his class of
25, in which roughly eight students were from Saratoga, college students composed the majority of Jones’ classmates.

“I definitely would have liked to get to know more of the college students, but the structure of the class didn’t lean toward that avenue. The math was entirely lecture,” Jones said. “This is a pretty strong contrast to Saratoga’s classes, where there are a lot of group interactions.”

The lecture-oriented nature of her course also prevented Zhang from interacting much with college students, even though there were no Saratoga students in her class.

Unlike Jones and Zhang, junior Amanda Chow attended a special West Valley multivariable calculus course during the first semester that held classes at Lynbrook High.

“Most of my classmates were Lynbrook students, but there were two other Saratoga students and a few from other schools like Westmont and Cupertino,” Chow said. “There were also several West Valley students but a majority of my classmates were still high school students.”

Chow, who is considering a linear algebra course for the spring, decided to take multivariable calculus partly because she had no other math options at the high school.

“Usually when people at Saratoga finish Calculus BC before senior year, they either take statistics at school, math at West Valley, or both,” Chow said. “But I already took statistics last year, so I decided to take multivariable calculus at West Valley.”

Zhang had also finished the high school’s math courses.

“I was always interested in math, so after finishing the math classes available at Saratoga, including stats, I wanted to continue,” Zhang said.

Unlike Zhang and Chow, Jones is taking statistics this year in addition to his college course. However, he considers statistics “a tangential math class rather than one that goes more in depth.”

“I chose to continue math at West Valley since I had a good time in Calculus BC, and multivariable [calculus] sounded like a fun next level,” Jones said.

“I’m glad I did follow through, though. Maybe it’s just weird that I enjoyed learning how to do more math, but I think it’s fun and exciting,” Jones said. “Now I can look at most Wikipedia pages on physics math and finally understand what all of the funny integral sign variants and other Greek letters mean.”