Throughout our educational career, whether we liked it or not, math has always been the subject we personally excelled at. Sure, at first, it was embarrassing to be constantly-affectionately recognized by our peers as ‘the math nerds,’ but as time went on, we learned to embrace it. Dare we say, even be proud of it.

We were so eager and proud of the fact that we would be able to take Calc 2 as seniors.  So you can probably imagine our complete and utter dismay when we heard that the privilege may be taken away. It felt like all of our hard work over the last few years had flown right out the window.

Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but we stand by our feelings.

Our path had been set in stone from the minute we took that placement test back in sixth grade, the one that deemed us ready for Algebra 1. Coming to the high school every other day as eighth graders to take Algebra 2 served as a test for future hardships we would face at school. Staying in a higher math class meant meeting our individual needs as students. Once we learned about the prospect of Calculus 2, we were immediately excited to learn that we were going to be one of the few people able to take the course, not to mention how much money we would ultimately save in college.

Up until the very last week of freshmen year, it was smooth sailing for us. We got our work done, studied hard and ended the year with good grades. During the last week of the school year, our math teacher mentioned a rumor that was going around stating that there would be some major changes to the math curriculum that would likely drastically affect the three freshmen taking that class.

That was us.

So naturally, we went all over the school in search of some answers, and were met with the same response nearly every time: “I have no idea what is going on,” or, “What do you mean the math curriculum is changing?!” And by the end of the day, we were exhausted and had only received a fuzzy outline of what was to come our way.

As the school year came to a close, we were forced to make a decision. We could either continue on our way to Calculus 2 as seniors, or we could go the IB route and essentially retake a year of math, a consequence of our school’s switch to IB math.  Basically, one way we would be unable to be full IB (a dream of ours), and the other way we wouldn’t be able to do Calc 2 (another dream of ours). And it looks like we got the short end of that stick.

Our hope for any future curriculum change is that the communication from administrator to teacher to student is more established, so that students can be made aware and more confident in their choices as they pick their classes for the future.