I'm not a believer that AP Calculus is the end-all, be-all of high school math. Neither do I believe the recent fad of badmouthing calculus and redirecting students into statistics classes (full disclosure: I teach statistics). I think we should offer a variety of courses and let students choose what they want.
I'm not a fan of AP classes and their tests. In theory they sound good--I'm all about external evaluations to maintain standards--but I don't like how much taxpayer money goes into the pockets of the College Board. Just to give you an idea, we at the schools get kids to register for the tests, we used to collect the money but now I think the students pay online, we order the tests, we set up and administer the tests (several different tests over the course of a couple weeks), we box up the materials and return them to the College Board--and they score them. A lot of school employee time is spent so that the College Board can keep all that money. Public education shouldn't be that way.
This is my 20th year at my current school, and most (all?) of those years I taught pre-calculus. We're supposed to be getting new textbooks/curriculum for the course next year, and then we'll no doubt need even newer books and curriculum for, wait for it, AP Precalculus! A new course for the 2023-24 school year:
In AP Precalculus, students explore everyday situations and phenomena using mathematical tools and lenses. The framework focuses on four key units of study that colleges expect students to demonstrate to qualify for credit or placement.
Great, just great.
And AP Calculus isn't necessarily all that and a bag of chips, either, because of its reliance on graphing calculators.
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