<p>I think that you worked pretty hard to get an internship or job this past summer so it appears that that is over and that you’re preparing for the fall.</p>
<p>You’re right in that many school districts just wave their kids past their math courses. This can happen at the University level too (I’ve personally seen it). I don’t know enough about you to know how you learn or absorb material but the best way that I’ve seen for kids to learn the material on your own is to work through the problem sets. When you get stuck, ask for help. You might try [Physics</a> Help and Math Help - Physics Forums](<a href=“http://www.physicsforums.com/]Physics”>http://www.physicsforums.com/) as they have a math area where you can ask questions. They tend not to give you the answer but rather try to provide a path to where you can solve the problem on your own.</p>
<p>Our daughter took precalc at a local community college and I found that there were deficiencies in some area, trig in particular. You can have some students ask a lot of questions about homework problems which consumes class time and makes it impossible to cover all of the expected topics. I just supplemented her learning by giving her a trig textbook, going over topics and doing problems together. A lot of students won’t want to teach you a topics like trig, logs, etc. You might find someone with the time and patience to do so - there are people out there like this but they will expect you to pick things up quickly.</p>
<p>My son is a tutor at his school for calculus, physics and a bunch of other things. He says that the biggest problem that he sees is inadequate high-school math preparation. Problems with algebra, trig and logs. In college, particularly at a great school like CMU, there are a number of kids that live and breathe this stuff and you can see that this puts you at a disadvantage. You don’t have to live and breathe math but you at least need to understand all of the background material and have an adequate level of fluency in putting together different areas of math.</p>
<p>As far as fairness goes, life isn’t fair. The resources available to some school districts dwarfs other districts. Some districts may spend $25,000 per student per year. Others may spend $8,000. That’s a pretty big difference in potential quality but it often doesn’t even make up for parental differences. The differences in the first six years of life can be huge. Affluent parents or middle-class parents with an education can teach their kids how to read and work with number and abstract concepts before school starts giving them a love of learning and a huge head-start over kids that are put in front of televisions all day. Schools are supposed to be equalizers and for some people they are but it is unrealistic to expect schools to compensate for parental differences. Life isn’t fair but you do the best with what you have. You just need to figure out how to do this.</p>