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While most 5-year-old kids in Pleasanton were navigating kindergarten on a screen during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Terisa Saravanan was at home learning second grade-level math.
Now Saravanan is one of the youngest students in the nation to score a 5 on the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam.
“I like the challenge, solving difficult problems,” Saravanan told the Weekly.
Dad Saravanan Jayavelu is an engineer and information technology specialist who moved to Pleasanton in 2019 with his two daughters, the youngest of whom is Saravanan (whose last name is the same as her father’s first name).
Saravanan, who was 5 years old when they moved to the Tri-Valley, started kindergarten at Vintage Hills Elementary School that same year. Shortly after, the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools across the Pleasanton Unified School District, and the country, to practice remote learning.
Because of pandemic conditions, Jayavelu said he assumed the responsibility of teaching his daughter. But as he began teaching her, he soon realized just how fast Saravanan was learning the material, especially when it came to math.
He said by age 5, she was able to grasp the concept of numbers going up to a quintillion. That’s when he knew his daughter was gifted.
“She learned borrow-subtraction in like less than half an hour,” Jayavelu said. “Children don’t learn it until second grade.”
Upon realizing her skill, he decided to homeschool his daughter so she could continue moving at her own, quick pace.Â
“By age 5 she had actually moved on to learning variables, long multiplication, long division and at age six she learned 90 degree trigonometry,” he added.
Over the few years, Saravanan continued her homeschool education – and continued to rapidly progress. In the past four years, she completed, or is in the process of completing, a total of four high school mathematics courses (including honors algebra at 9), in addition to her elementary and middle school studies in other subjects.
Those high school courses included the prerequisite course needed to advance to AP Calculus AB, a subject her dad had already been teaching her since she was 9.
“(In) calculus, she’s at my level,” her dad said. “When we were doing AP Calculus together, there were times actually she was teaching me.”
That led her to eventually take the AP test this past spring and become one of the youngest students to earn a score of 5, which is the highest possible score for AP exams and allows her to receive college credit for the course.
She said even though she was nervous before taking the four-hour AP test, she was fairly confident in the days leading up to the exam that she would get a score of 5.Â
“On the day of the exam, I asked her, ‘What score are you expecting to get?'” he said. “She said 5.”
While the news didn’t immediately register the night the two learned her score, she said she was very happy about the result the following day.
Looking ahead, Saravanan said she wants to become a nuclear and quantum physicist, both of which require a lot of math. Jayavelu said while his hope is for his daughter to get into college by or around age 15, he doesn’t want to push her too much and mainly wants her to be happy.
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