Dan Anderson is a math teacher at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Brooklyn (TYWLS Brooklyn), a school in our Young Women’s Leadership network.

Mateo, one of the episode’s producers, is a student at Central Park East High School, a CollegeBound Initiative partner school.

Produced by Mateo and Jasper for Chalkbeat’s P.S. Weekly podcast
Originally released on April 23, 2026

Is AP Calculus pointless? A teacher defends his subject.

To many New York City students, Advanced Placement Calculus feels impractical, full of information they won’t use in their day-to-day lives — though it’s become a status symbol for some high achievers.

But reaching that status symbol has some significant consequences: AP Calculus has garnered a reputation for being a barrier to higher education. The class has become a gatekeeper, with many selective colleges requiring students to take the subject. Those who took it in high school are at an advantage, and schools with majority Black and Latino students tend to miss out. The number of such schools offering calculus has hovered under 40% over the past decade, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.

P.S. Weekly producers Mateo T., a junior at Central Park East High School, and Jasper M., a senior at High School of Art and Design, ask: Does AP calculus serve a purpose other than proving academic rigor to colleges? They explore the unseen value of calculus beyond the classroom.

Mateo sits down with Dash Anderson, a Brooklyn high school math teacher who shares his experience teaching calculus in a way that brings the subject to life with real-world examples, from video games to “Moana.”

“One of the first days of class, I showed them The Little Mermaid and Moana side by side. The Little Mermaid was hand-animated; somebody had to draw those waves and water droplets one by one. In Moana and other 3-D animated movies and CGI, that relies on physics simulations. The reason that water looks so realistic there is that it’s built on math. Someone had to recreate the physics of how water behaves in the real world using calculus. Then they animate the characters and the water reacts the way water should.”