I want to major in ME and I’m taking pre-cal right now and I’m flying through it like its nothing (outside of 1 or 2 tests), the year is about to end ( only 3 months left until graduation) and I feel like I have done nothing to prepare for calculus. So far we are at rational functions and things like asymptotes. I don’t know if that’s useful or not but shouldn’t pre-cal have some trig in it? So far nothing about trig has been done and I feel like I’m wasting my time.
BTW I’m a senior in high school if that means anything.
You haven’t done derivatives? Integrals? I did both in my pre-calc class. The trig came back when we first started derivatives. Also tho, my school teaches Alg2/Trig as a combined class before pre-calc.
You could always do a summer course before college if you don’t feel adequately prepared. Maybe online or at a local college? You could also just buy books to review before school starts.
Are you saying you have not had trigonometry? At my kids’ high school, pre-calculus was the class that combined a semester of trigonometry and a semester of the more advanced topics of algebra 2. It did not cover any calculus.
While you do not need to have any calculus to start engineering, trigonometry is a prerequisite to calculus.
The only trig I`ve had was in geometry class and it was very brief and basic. Most of what I have been learning in pre-cal is algebra 2 extended. Maybe we are still getting to it, I don’t know.
@boneh3ad I guess my school doesn’t follow the normal path then. Our precalc class is mostly limits and derivatives. Sorry if that was confusing, I didn’t realize most schools aren’t on the same path.
It is confusing due to the many variations these days in hs math sequence. But I’d advise anybody going into engineering to have a good understanding of trig. Do self-study if needed.
Apparently my teacher is saving trig for the end because its the hardest part for her students in the past. I have a friend who told me that she usually goes over it as the last unit. Now we`re on exponential functions and logarithms, I think the next unit is trig and circles.