I took calculus as a senior, started with algebra in 7th grade, otherwise it is pretty close to how Thudlow Boink described it. I don’t think it was offered any sooner than that, and in any case under the circumstances I couldn’t have managed it sooner anyhow. Today I am the proud owner of a minor in math.
Calculus was offered as an elective math class that could be taken by seniors at my high school. Only a very few people (about 5 per year in a school with 250-plus people in each grade) ever took it. Even the very smart kids who were good at math usually only made it to trigonometry and pre-calculus (taught for one semester each, so you would take them both in the same grade if you took them). I took statistics my senior year instead, because I wanted to have my HS records show I took math all four years, but I didn’t have to take any math my senior year to graduate. (The other three high school years, I took algebra, geometry and algebra II. Ugh, how I hated algebra…)
At my high school, calc was also only available senior year. If I remember the curriculum right, it was Advanced Algebra in 9th grade, Geometry/Trig in 10th, Pre-Cal in 11th, and AP Calc in 12th. We had about 30 students in calc in a class of 365.
Math I learned as a kid I generally can still do, and math I learned as a teenager I forgot the moment the course was over. I wonder if I had learned calculus ten years earlier, would I have retained it much better?
Heck, that bit predates TNG by 40 years, at least. A 1948 Superman story, the first to extensively give his origin, depicts pre-disaster Kryptonians, including a couple having the following conversation:
Woman: I’m worried! Junior has reached the third grade and does not yet know his calculus!
Man: He is a trifle backward, but next year he’ll be five years old and he’ll know it by then!
**What is the earliest age that calculus is commonly taught? **
The Age of Enlightenment
The most recent figures that I can find say that in 1998, 86% of American high schools offered calculus and 12% of American high school students take calculus. An undated more recent report says that 16% of American high school students take calculus. I suspect that somewhere between 90% and 95% of American high schools now offer calculus.
Offering calculus at all is relatively recent in most American high schools. When I graduated from high school in 1970, not only did my high school not offer calculus (and I didn’t go to the absolute worst high school in the world), but if you had suggested that they should offer it, the teachers and students would have thought you insane for suggesting such a thing. Only about 10% of the students could even struggle through the college-prep math course (algebra, plain geometry, second-year algebra, and solid geometry/trigonometry) by the end of their senior year.
I might as well chime in. I went to school in the late 80’s and we kind of had calculus. I mean we did algebra in 8th grade, then geometry in 9th, algebraII in 10th. In junior year we had a sort of precalculus course. By that I mean that it had subjects like trig(in radians) exponents/logs. But we also had some limits and various basic derivatives and integrals. Unfortunately with no explanation what they were good for. (Oh and the class wasn’t taught very well. I was the only one in the class that could actually do a derivative by hand mostly because I gave up listening to the teacher and just reading the book.) Of course by the time I got to college I had forgotten most of it, hadn’t been taught the theory so when I took a calc placement test it said my calc was weak at best. (That of course leads in to my old story about being told to take the hardest freshman physics course they offered which was predicated on the understanding that you actually knew calc fairly well. That did not go well. Oh, physics makes a heck of a lot of sense if you know physics btw.)
We didn’t offer it at all in the 80s when I went to high school.
Advanced math students in my son’s year (he is in seventh grade) will have enough prereqs to take it as 12th graders. My daughters year they are trying to accelerate a few kids further, she might be able to take it as an eleventh grader.
There is a math magnet where they start earlier - tenth grade?
My daughter’s in the CPS schools, where they don’t use a traditional math curriculum, but rather the University of Chicago’s Everyday Mathematics program. It’s kind of neat, but you can’t really answer a question like this - it includes a bit of arithmetic, a bit of algebra, a bit of geometry, and for all I know, calculus (never taken it myself) concepts all mixed up, like. She’s doing really well at it, and groks math that I just learned by rote, but I don’t think we should move into a different school district before sixth grade is done - her skills may be advanced in some areas and lacking in others as other math programs organize things.
My son went to a CPS high school - no calc was offered, although they did have a special mathcentric college track. :rolleyes: Then he transferred to DeVry Advantage Academy, where my only complaint is that they made him take Algebra again because that’s how their charter is set up, even though they teach Calculus in the next hall over. Their high school students do not get Calculus at all.
Back in the late 80’s early 90’s in the Chicago suburban school I attended, most students took pre-algebra as freshmen, algebra as sophomores, geometry as juniors and algebra II as seniors. “Smart” kids had already done pre-algebra as 8th graders, so did algebra as freshmen, geometry as sophomores, algebra II as juniors and pre-calc as seniors. (Pre-calc included trig stuff, IIRC) “Really super smart” kids started with geometry and progressed to AP Calculus. I don’t believe there was a “regular” calculus, it was AP or nothing - although you didn’t have to take the AP exam, of course.
tldr: When I was a kid, senior year of high school, but only a minority of students.
I graduated in 2006. Calculus was offered as the fast-track math offering for students in their senior year (age 17, normally) but there were always a couple who took it a year earlier. I had a precalculus class in my junior year that dealt with integration and differentiation. Probably 10% of the student body took the class.
I wonder what percent of new college students took calculus? I know at some colleges nearly everyone has taken it, but then you have places like UTEP where most incoming students have to take remedial math.
ETA some info here: The Changing Face of Calculus: First-Semester Calculus as a High School Course | Mathematical Association of America
Interesting.
In light of what mcgato said earlier,
(which, from my own experience teaching college calculus, I have no trouble believing), I found this interesting:
Do american high school students have much choice at all about what courses they do at school?
Calculus is absolutely compulsory for any UK high school student doing maths. If I didn’t make that clear earlier.
Yes, there is a reasonable amount of flexibility. At my school, we had four different tracks: a remedial track, a standard level track, an advanced track, and an honors or AP (advanced placement) track. You can choose between the courses as long as you get approval of the department. You can choose which level was appropriate for you, but the higher levels required approval of the department, and often extra fees.
I think I understand what you’re talking about, but you’re going to have to clarify “doing maths” for those of us who don’t know what that means.
Yes, please.
As I understand it, in the UK, students begin to specialize around 16. At that point, they pick three subjects to study in depth, and take an exam of some kind after two years. Then in college, they study one of those subjects.
Here in America, most students don’t pick a single subject to study until after their second year of college, and even then, they have the option of taking classes in other subjects. The exceptions are students in engineering, business and other professional degrees, who specialize much more from the beginning of college.
ETA: Students who are college-bound will usually take calculus in high school assuming that it’s offered. Those who aren’t college bound will take other math classes, and may only have to take three years of math. I’m not really familiar with that sort of track, though, so don’t take that last bit as gospel.
Maybe things have changed, but I think you’re overestimating how many college-bound students take calculus in high school. If you’re going into engineering/math/science type of majors, you would take calculus, but the average college-bound senior, in my experience, would not have taken calculus. Now, I graduated in 1993, but in my class, under 10% of seniors took calculus. but I would guess that over 90% of them went to college.
1993 was a long time ago, and at least at elite colleges, admissions are a lot more competitive now than they were then. I probably am overestimating just because I’m more familiar with elite schools, but 10% overall is way too low.
For elite schools, I would agree. For general college-bound freshman, I’d be surprised if it’s much above 10-15%. Heck, even with elite schools, I’d be surprised if it’s above 25%.