<p>It seems like everyone on the math sequence thread took Pre Calc/Honors Pre Calc before any AP Calc class. And I'm skipping Pre Calc; going straight from Honors Algebra II/Trig to AP Calculus AB. </p>
<p>I don't even know what people do in Pre Calc because everyone in my school who gets an A in Honors Algebra II/Trig is put in AP Calc AB. So I'm freaked out by this, going straight into a brand new math area without Pre Calc.</p>
<p>Anyone else on here who's done this and give me some words of encouragement haha?</p>
<p>Er…look up some PreCalc worksheets online and do some practice if it will make you feel better. Really all precalc is learning about equations and there graphs and what not. I’m sure when you see the material you’ll feel more confident.</p>
<p>Okay, I’ve also heard Pre-Calc is really in depth Trig stuff too? Or is that wrong?</p>
<p>I would try to teach yourself some of the pre calc topics to have a stronger base going into ap calc</p>
<p>I think so. A good 5 chapters out of our 12 were based on graphs, equations, and the behavior of trig identities also learn the unit circle.</p>
<p>Unit circle is my life lol. I think it’s the most beautiful thing in math haha.</p>
<p>Hahaha my teacher is obsessed with it. Literally we spent 3 days coloring and customizing our own unit circle. She even had a clock of it.</p>
<p>Most of pre-calc is trig anyway… the other stuff is basically more advanced algebra (pretty damn easy) and conics/vectors. You don’t need conics/vectors for Calc AB anyway, but if you plan to take BC at some point I’d recommend going over them.</p>
<p>Conics as in conic sections (parabolas, hyperbolas, ellipses, etc.)? And I don’t know what vectors are haha.</p>
<p>Isn’t it that stuff like r=sin x or something like that and you have your roses and weird side blobs and concave/convex blobs and your spirals?</p>
<p>^ What the hell? Hahaha I have no idea what you said</p>
<p>Pre-Calculus is just the math and approach methods used for the Calculus material. Think of it as Pre-Algebra in middle school. You don’t really learn “Algebra” in that class, you learn the methods and some of the math behind it. AP Calculus teachers in my school expect students to have a strong foundation in the math in Algebra II and Pre-Calculus. I’m taking Pre-Calculus next year, so I have no clue what the rigor of the class or what the things are taught in that class. I hoped I helped.</p>
<p>The roses and stuff like that only appear if your precalculus class does stuff with polar coordinates. A lot of the stuff that you learn in precalculus don’t show up in AB Calculus (but will in calc II and III).</p>
<p>So would you all say it’s good or bad that I’m going straight in to Calc AB?</p>
<p>I took an alg2/trig class that was more or less comprehensive, but not particularly rigorous and I was fine the next year going directly into Calculus. There is very little Calc. which is dependent on pre-calc and picking up those details as you go along will be one of the easier aspects of the class. The class I took wasn’t officially AP, but it was somewhere in between AB and BC and it included an intro to Laplace transforms, which we used to solve linear differential equations. That was fun :D</p>
<p>You should be fine (depending on your teacher - how much precalc stuff he/she incorporates into tests/homework).</p>
<p>Ooh ok yea polar coordinates…I stopped doing my homework in that class by the time we got there.</p>
<p>For the most part, Pre-Calculus is about 1/4 review of Algebra 1 and 2, 2/4 trigonometry, and 1/4 more advanced algebra. I would probably assume that you’ve covered the 1/4 review and 2/4 trig part, so that only leaves you with about 1/4 advanced algebra. Plus, teachers wouldn’t advance you to calculus if you weren’t ready for it.</p>
<p>The only things I’d imagine you would learn in Pre-Calculus that you possibly haven’t learned already would probably be polar coordinates, parametric equations, conic sections, sequences & series, and maybe vectors.</p>
<p>Well Precalculus in high school is Trigonometry and vectors (basically lines that have both direction and magnitude- scalars with direction). However, parametrization, polar coordinates, Euler’s identity as well as geometric interprerations of the complex plane and its transformations should be taught, I believe. More topics that should be covered in high school according to me are derivations of dot and cross products and mostly, PROOFS of all the identities, not merely stating them. However, many school districts just barely scrape these topics, which I think completely takes out the fun of Precalculus.</p>
<p>I’ve learned a lot of this stuff, but not polar coordinates or the vector stuff but that’s it.</p>