I feel like I'm learning nothing in pre-cal?

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

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.

2

When I took pre-calc in high school, a substantial portion of it was algebra 2 review.

3

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.

4

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.

5

That’s very unusual to do derivatives or integrals in pre-calculus. That’s normally reserved for calculus proper.

6

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.

7

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.

8

@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.

9

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.

10

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.