<p>I really like physics as a subject. However, my teacher at my school (the only AP physics teacher), I'm sorry to say, is not good at teaching the subject. He barely even touches the calculus portions of it or goes into details about explaining the concepts. I'm having a really hard time understanding physics because of this, and also because I'm "physics" challenged, but I really want to take the AP (B and C portions). </p>
<p>Can someone please help me, give me some advice, or something?</p>
<p>Do you need the Calc parts for the AP Exam? I don't think so, because the majority of our Phys B class (including moi) is juniors who haven't taken Calc yet.</p>
<p>You need calc to take the physics C portions. I'm not sure just how deeply you need to go into calculus, however.</p>
<p>To the OP, are you in an AP Physics B class or an AP Physics C class? These classes don't run concurrently at my school (and I wasn't aware that there were schools who do run them concurrently), and accordingly, you may not pick up the calc concepts if you're in an AP Physics B class.</p>
<p>well, I took BC calc last year. I'm taking phy C class, but some of the students in the phy c class opt to take the b exam in addition to the c exams. I just don't really know how to prepare myself for the exam, and textbooks don't come in until 3 weeks (from like, around today) because too many students signed up for the class and they ran out of books.</p>
<p>If you are learning mechanics at the moment, I wouldn't worry much about it. Calculus doesn't really come along in physics until electricity and magnetism. The only calculus I remember being taught early in my mechanics course was the relation between position, velocity, and acceleration, which I had already learned through my study of calculus.</p>
<p>I definitely remember the first part of my mechanics course being very conceptual, and since this is going to be a tested a lot on the AP Exam (it's not just calculus and formulas), you're just going to have to suck it up, sit down with a book, and stare at it until you start understanding the concepts.</p>
<p>I wouldn't worry about mechanics if I were you. If you took Calc BC already, you must have been exposed to the position/velocity/acceleration relationships already, and most if the other physics formulas are very easy to derive a calculus formula from if you know what you're doing. </p>
<p>If you want to start now, definitely try looking the E&M section, as that takes a while to get down.</p>
<p>Our Physics C has used product rule, quotient rule, chain rule, U-substitution integration, trig-substitution integration, line integration, double integration, and triple integration so far. However, we're about to hit Chapter 27 in the Fundamentals of Physics book, so we're a bit ahead. We haven't had to use integration by parts yet, though. </p>
<p>Meh, 50% curve for the 5...everybody should be able to get 4s and 5s. Kinda scary how many 1s and 2s are out there though.</p>
<p>Furthermore, our school does run Physics C and B concurrently. While Mechanics and E&M serve the CEs and EEs out there, the Physics B thermal and modern physics is nice to have for future MEs and NEs. So yeah...</p>
<p>My school doesn't have Physics B offered as a class.
And I can't believe it-Apostrophe, you're already in chapter 27? We're only on ch 4 of our book, and there's like 35 chapters in it! I'm pretty preoccupied about the snail pace at which we're going in addition to the dearth of info my teacher's covering. Oh well, I guess that's life...</p>