Good news: Gavilan is offering multi-variable calculus this
semester, and if present trends continue, will be able to offer a
full two years of engineering-track math in the future.
Good news: Gavilan is offering multi-variable calculus this semester, and if present trends continue, will be able to offer a full two years of engineering-track math in the future. In contrast, in previous years, Gav has not offered Math 1C, multi, every semester, and has offered Math 2 and 2C, linear algebra and differential equations, sporadically if at all. Gav rarely offers linear or differential equations because there are rarely enough students to fill a class. When I say fill, I don’t mean 30 students. I mean there are rarely 10. Sometimes there are not five.
It is amazing but true: Gavilan serves Gilroy, Morgan Hill, and Hollister, three bedroom communities of Silicon Valley. Our schools have a large percentage of students who are the children of engineers and computer programmers. Yet somehow these students are graduating from area high schools without enough math to place into calculus in their freshman year at community college. 
Moreover, the few mathematically competent students, the future engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and doctors, who contemplate taking their first two years at Gavilan, immediately realize that it will be impossible to complete their general ed at Gav. So they go south to Hartnell, or west to Cabrillo, or north to Evergreen, or northwest to West Valley, where they swell the classes in physics, chemistry, computer science, and biology… and Gav adds another section of remedial math. 
Last fall, my daughter was ready to take multi, but multi was not offered. I was shocked. I know that linear would be a problem, but multi! I was assured that multi would at least be offered in the spring, and that providing sufficient students enrolled, the class would not be dropped. 
So my daughter and I began linear at home out of my husband’s old linear textbook. (My old linear textbook is Apostol: too abstruse for me, let alone my daughter.) We got as far as parametrizing a matrix, but not even close to eigenvalues and eigenvectors, before we gave up. I had forgotten too much to teach it effectively. 
Spring semester arrived; my daughter enrolled in multi. So did I, for three reasons. The reason I gave the counselor who signed my transcript is true enough: I am re-entering the work force, probably to teach math, and I want to relearn multi. The second reason is that my daughter needs the class; I do not want to see it dropped for lack of enrollment. And the third is that Gav scheduled multi as an evening class, and I do not want my daughter walking through mountain lion habitat at night by herself. Our first class of the semester, I was delighted to count 12 students! Three of us have taken multi before, albeit decades ago, and are re-learning it so we can effectively teach or tutor it. A few are Gavilan students. But almost half the class are high school aged students. I have not yet done my research to see how so many teenagers have prepared for second-year calculus before turning 18, but I strongly suspect it has something to do with the man I plopped down next to my first evening in class. 
“Hi,” I said, offering my hand. “I am Cynthia Walker.” ”I know,” he said, shaking it. Maybe some day I will get used to notoriety. Probably not. A few sentences later, he figured out that I truly could not place him, and offered the information that he was Wayne Scott. Wayne Scott! the GHS calculus teacher who penned so many barbed letters to the editor. Wayne Scott, who accused a straight news reporter who wrote about AP classes at GHS of a questionable level of journalism, unfairness, political purposes, throwing statistically invalid numbers around, and non-objectivity. Wayne Scott, statistics teacher, who wrote: “Analyzing AP and SAT data violates many of the basic tenets of statistics.” 
I still disagree with Mr. Scott’s letters to the editor of bygone years, but now I have seen that as a classmate, he knows his calculus. As a teacher, he prepared several students so that they can take multi. As a fellow teacher, he shares generously of his resources and knowledge. Life is full of surprises.   
