HS math: is calc a good idea?

Parent Cafe
41

<p>Small schools with engineering that are not super-selective include South Dakota Mines and New Mexico Tech. Their OOS list prices are relatively low (and NMT does offer WUE discounts and perhaps other scholarships), though OOS financial aid might not be that great beyond that. May be worth looking into to see if they would be suitable safety or low-match schools, if the cost and financial aid work.</p>

<p>But their relatively remote locations may not be that great from a medical standpoint; larger schools in larger cities may have more ready availability of specialized medical services.</p>

42

<p>cromette,</p>

<p>I love the idea of A&M but I think he probably needs a milder, cooler climate. He actually tends toward dehydration in warm weather (been hospitalized once) and it saps his energy, so if we were to look at Texas, it actually might be Lubboch and Texas Tech or even UT Dallas. But, then again, things could change!</p>

<p>Does A&M have the same deal as UTD where, if you get scholarship, you’re automatically considered a resident? That would be good.</p>

<p>Yep, UCB, those schools are definitely under consideration. I think this year will give us more clarity.</p>

<p>At any rate, sorry to derail the conversation. As to the OP’s inquiry, it does seem that’s it’s fine to do Calculus in high school and in fact, is a good and necessary prerequisite for some schools.</p>

43

<p>I do have a USA(J)MO qualifying kid, and although he likes contests, he isn’t one of those kids who wants to spend any time prepping for them. He likes to take them cold. I originally suggested mathcounts and aops alcumus problem solving because for some kids, those type of deeper thinking problems really make them go “aha.” For some kids the type of problems that you encounter in a regular curriculum are just kind of blah – and even though you’re good at them, they just don’t excite you. There’s not a lot of “there” there.</p>

<p>The good news is there is a whole world of math out there! Logic, probability, number theory, set theory, group theory, problem solving, etc. are all good jumping off points --and if you homeschool, you may have the opportunity to explore some of them. Don’t think of math as a column, with one block on top of another (the way we traditionally think of a math curriculum)-- think of it as a forest full of deciduous trees, each with lots of branches and twigs. </p>

<p>Like sbjdorlo, my kids have loved the classes at AOPS, but with internet connectivity issues for the OP it may be hard to participate in the classes. We liked their books, and their classes are now accredited. I can recommend competition math for Middle School students, their algebra books and more. Maybe you could look at their Algebra textbook (it comes with a solution manual). We didn’t use them for Algebra 1, but did for Intermediate Algebra. </p>

<p>Finally, there may be a high school or middle school near you that offers the AMC tests. The AMC 8 is only for kids 8th grade and younger, and is a 25 question test with lots of problem solving. My kids’ school doesn’t offer it, so we ended up driving the older one to a junior college about 90 minutes away so he could take the AMC 10 when he was in 8th grade (you can find the list of institutes of higher learning that offer it on the AMC website). That was a good experience for him. He qualified for AIME that year, and I think that experience is what enabled him to be qualify for the Olympiad this year. Next year, he hopes to get out of the single digits on his Olympiad score (which, again, would be easier if he would prep).</p>

<p>Anyway, this got long, but I want to say that I encourage you to help your child find the “beautiful” part of mathematics that you talked about in your original post. It’s out there, it may be just getting enough exposure to really find the thing that awes you.</p>

44

<p>

</p>

<p>Some Texas A&M scholarships come with non-resident tuition waivers:
<a href=“Home - SFAID”>Home - SFAID;
This includes the National Merit Finalist ones:
<a href=“Home - SFAID”>Home - SFAID;

45

<p>sbjdro…It is not really hotter at A&M from Dallas. So if your child would consider Dallas, then your child shouldn’t exclude College Station. I cannot say one is better than the other, but A&M has the bigger image here. I know it technically ranks higher. I cannot attest to anything else on that.</p>

46

<p>McMillerwest…with each program we have used, we have never used the internet, until right now. We have one child using 1 internet program and we have internet issues too. I would rather not use internet for this, but it is a college course.</p>

<p>Chalkdust (who uses Larsen’s) and Math-U-See (MUS) have dvds. There is some DVD you can order for Jacobs too. </p>

<p>Foersters is great too. We have that one too, but the Algebra 2 and precal. But, we ended up using MUS instead. I do not think it comes in the algebra.</p>

47

<p>My favorite Jacobs math book is [Mathematics:</a> A Human Endeavor (3rd Edition): Harold R. Jacobs: 9780716724261: Amazon.com: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Human-Endeavor-3rd-Edition/dp/071672426X]Mathematics:”>http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Human-Endeavor-3rd-Edition/dp/071672426X). It has all the math that doesn’t normally get covered in high school.</p>

48

<p>I DO understand about the heat. It does a number on my husband too. But eightisgreat is right. Actually, any place in Texas is pretty hot for a lot of the year. And Dallas isn’t really significantly cooler than college station.</p>

49

<p>I think calc is a good idea if the student is inclined. Competitive colleges value it. My daughter made sacrifices to get to calc by Sr year. She was ambitious and wanted to show she was doing a highly rigorous schedule. She also felt competitive in math and wanted to prove something to herself. She was sorry she couldn’t take AP Prob & Stats too as it was a very popular course at her school taught by a favored teacher. She doubled up on Geometry and Alg II sophmore year so she could get to AP Calc BC Sr yr, since her 8th grade school didn’t offer algebra. She took a lot of math and physics classes in college, then ended up majoring in math/computer science. </p>

<p>As a side note, she should have taken Calc over again before tackling multivariable calc in college even though she got a 5 on the AP exam. She initially failed calc III. She did take it over again successfully, and go on to all kinds of advanced math as a math/CS major. Fortunately for her, Brown doesn’t record anything less than a C so she was not penalized for this and is in a phD track program in CS.</p>

50

<p>

</p>

<p>Brown offers its own optional calculus placement test for students unsure of which math course to start in (did she try it before choosing her first math course?). It also has various levels of math courses for students with different levels of preparation and interest.</p>

<p>[Brown</a> University Mathematics Department](<a href=“http://www.math.brown.edu/mathguide.html]Brown”>http://www.math.brown.edu/mathguide.html)</p>

<p>It is not that unusual for students with 5 on BC to go directly to college sophomore level math and do fine (A grades).</p>

51

<p>I don’t know if she took a placement test, but that would have been a smart resource to use. I just recall hearing about how she was going in circles, that she needed to do the problems so that she could ‘get it’ but she couldn’t do the problems until she ‘got it’. She finally had some kind of epiphany after talking by chance to an old History of Math professor who gave her some insight into working the problem sets. I also don’t know what track or level of course she took, but it was likely too advanced.</p>

52

<p>High school math books that I really like are:
Algebra I by Paul A. Foerster
Algebra and Trigonometry by Paul A. Foerster
Geometry by Edwin E. Moise and Floyd L. Downs, Jr. (proof based)</p>

<p>I think the Foerster books have been mentioned earlier.</p>

<p>With regard to acceleration in English (rare) vs. acceleration in math (common): In a reasonably decent high school English class, a student is reading books written by adults for adults. Even if the student has read the books already, there is often something to be gained by reading them for a second time. Even if the class discussion is below the student’s level, there might be something gained from it. Even if nothing at all is gained from the class discussion, the student is still not wasting all of the time spent on the class (usually). A teacher who does not require high-level analysis of the reading can still recognize it, comment on insights, and perhaps suggest a way to go deeper into the analysis. </p>

<p>In contrast, once a student really understands quadratic equations (including complex roots), there is nothing more to be gained until the student takes abstract algebra (or in a truly extraordinary case, invents it). Adults who use mathematics do not solve quadratic equations except when they occasionally encounter them in the course of their work, and then dispatch them quickly. So being stuck in a class devoted to solving quadratic equations truly offers nothing at all to an advanced math student. Abstract algebra tends to require more maturity than a 7th grader has, even a very exceptional one.</p>

<p>If the math teacher is not “mathy,” it can be hard for the teacher to separate the students who really got calculus from those with 5/A who really should retake it.</p>

53

<p>The Art of Problem Solving courses are quite good, also. The books are available, if the student/parents don’t want to pay for the course. They have free online materials, also (the last I looked).</p>

54

<p>For entertaining reading connected with mathematics, I recommend pretty much any of the books by Ian Stewart. Also, the books by Raymond Smullyan (e.g., The Lady or the Tiger? and What is the Name of this Book?) are great for logical thinking. One of Smullyan’s books takes the reader up to Goedel’s theorem. The Smullyan books are mostly out of print, and some of the prices for used books on Amazon are ridiculous, but if you wait it out, you can probably find one at a reasonable price.</p>

55

<p>The “word on the street” about Saxon math is that it’s pretty cut and dried. We didn’t try it out, so I can’t confirm or refute this, but maybe other posters have some direct experience with it?</p>

56

<p>My son also loved [The</a> Book of Numbers: John H. Conway, Richard Guy: 9780387979939: Amazon.com: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Numbers-John-Conway/dp/038797993X]The”>http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Numbers-John-Conway/dp/038797993X) . One reviewer said for people with a knowledge of calculus, but my son was fascinated by it when he was just beginning algebra.</p>

57

<p>

</p>

<p>It is easier to self-accelerate in English through elementary school, as long as the way the school runs classes enables kids to choose most of their own reading and doesn’t force them into mind-numbing activities such as drilling phonics and spelling words and trudging through a class text at the same speed as the slower readers. Since HS usually has more set texts, it gets more difficult, but at that point one can hope for streamed classes, which helps. And if the texts are challenging, such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Hawthorne, and so forth, that’s okay too. At our HS, juniors and seniors select from a collection of 1-semester electives, which makes a big difference. The kids in British Poetry will be the kids who chose to be there.</p>

<p>That said, Quant Mech, I think you underestimate the crushing boredom that can be experienced by an advanced student in an inappropriate English class. I was in that position for one quarter in HS after returning from a couple years abroad. It was excruciating to sit through, day after day, and I was in a college prep class in a very good HS. Being moved to the honors class next quarter was hugely liberating. (To give you some idea, my class in HS had 14 eventual NMFs plus at least 15 commendeds, and all of us were in that class of 20 or so. The English teachers took full advantage of the assembled talent, thank doG.)</p>

<p>As for college, I would look for an English department that does NOT consist of survey courses at the lower levels. I never had the kind of experience JHS describes in his D’s poetry class in college…it is unclear to me why those students are there at all. There is no doubt that if a student is writing very well at an early age, it is rare for them to get the kind of feedback that would push them to improve further. And <em>everyone</em> can improve.</p>

58

<p>Consolation, the class my daughter was talking about was a required first-year core curriculum class; everyone in the class had to take some version of it. They didn’t just read poetry, but they read a fair amount of poetry, since before the late Renaissance most Western “literature” tended not to be in prose.</p>

<p>At one point or another, when I was in school, I got accelerated in everything except English, which was clearly my strongest subject. I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone, including me, that you could accelerate in English. I learned very little in English class, but that was 50 minutes/day. No big deal. The required reading tended to be fine, and in any event it constituted about 20% of my reading, so again no big deal, and when I wrote papers on the reading I wrote them at my level, not the class level. I spent a school year in Spain in 10th grade, then took university Spanish lit classes when I came back, and went into a French 4 class cold turkey then took AP French Lit the next year. I didn’t feel there was any shortage of great literature for me to read, and reading it and writing about it in Spanish and French gave me plenty of challenge.</p>

<p>My English teachers were perfectly smart people who tried their best to point me in interesting directions, and that was fine; I really didn’t ask for more.</p>

59

<p>My school allowed me to do 4 years of English (10-12 + AP/College level) in 2 years. However, the classes were relatively large and a lot of the students were there because it was a requirement, and this is in a magnet/special school. My teacher was amazing and very nice, but a lot of the students were really rambunctious and disruptive, so they would complain when we discussed something too ‘easy’ and complain again if it was too hard (The Wasteland). It felt really formulaic to me and overly focused on developing essential skills like writing essays and doing reading comp MC. </p>

<p>It’s weird, because I can write lots of decent analysis about poetry but I don’t feel like I know how to truly appreciate and enjoy it. It feels very affected. Maybe my story is a better case for smaller classes where students can get more individualized instruction rather than outright acceleration. </p>

<p>My old school used (in my opinion) really terrible core-plus mathematics textbooks that wrecked my foundation, so I struggled when I did calc very early.</p>

60

<p>Consolation, I am curious about the type of discussion in the college-prep English class that you mentioned. I don’t think that my high-school English classes were particularly advanced, but I don’t recall finding the discussion boring. Could you give some examples?</p>