<p>People with ADHD have periods of complete focus and attention and probably why Cardinal Fang had success but for someone else this particular subject may be the difficult one. Hard to know. The best advice is to be cognizant and organized. My sons pediatrician has ADHD and a graduate of MIT. He refused all medication and chose to find other methods to accomplish his goal. Lists, lists and more lists help to make progress when things get chaotic, which they always do - even for those without ADD/ADHD.</p>
<p>Shrinkrap, I have an experiment for you - have him sit down at the table and do a problem from 5 different middle-late chapters from his precalc book. See how long it takes him to get right answers. Go to the library and get a book if he doesn’t have his at hand. I’m not kidding. This will tell you how well he did at that class and how ready he is to use that math as a portion of EVERY calculus problem he will do next semester. The precalc had better come easily or the calculus will be nearly impossible.</p>
<p>I strongly suspect that he didn’t spend anywhere near enough time on his assignments last semester. Next semester, as planned, will be at least twice as hard as the last semester - maybe three or four times as hard. He did NOT do well on Precalc for someone planning to take calculus next semester. He is very likely to do poorly next semester, even IF he drops all ECs, and even IF he takes the meds faithfully, and maybe even if he sits down with that precalc book and does every problem in it over again. With as much as one EC he’ll bomb almost for sure.</p>
<p>So if it were my kid, I’d be talking very seriously - no obliqueness, no maybes, but in a very concrete way - about what he will do after next semester if (more likely when) he bombs the hard classes. Will he come home to the CC? (Hardly a death sentence - my ADDer just spent several semesters there very fruitfully). He probably won’t be able to stay at that school.</p>
<p>If it were my kid, I’d hope that the discussion would result in planning a semester of Calc I, maybe the Bio, and otherwise only ‘easy’ classes, stuff he will almost certainly succeed at. Money not being your primary concern, let him take ‘fun’ easy classes in place of his former ECs and finish a semester on a strong note. And if it were my kid, I’d pre-arrange a GPA lower than which he’d have to leave the school anyway, as a way of saying that you are assuming a low GPA during an easy semester would indicate a lack of work on his part.</p>
<p>In other words, which path appeals to him the most - reducing the course load and ultimately succeeding, or dropping out of that school? Because that is far and away the most likely paths he is on.</p>
<p>Does the peer group know of his grades? Are they engineers or science majors?</p>
<p>My daughter has to pass Calc 2 for her Associates Degree and that’s the only thing that we’re concerned about for this spring. She took Calc 1 two years ago and I’ve quizzed her on a few things and she didn’t know the answers or general vicinity off the top of her head. She said that it was two years ago - I just said that it was 30+ years ago for me and I still remember this stuff. I’ve been giving her review problems from the Phillips Exeter Math Department in Math 1 and Math 2 (Algebra - Trig review) - she has to answer the questions or brush up (we have a pretty extensive math library at home) by reading up on topics in a math book or she can ask her brother. We will start reviewing Calc I next week and then get into Calc 2 the following week so she should have a running start for the actual course.</p>
<p>BTW, I’m quite impressed with the Phillips Exeter materials - best high-school math materials that I’ve run into.</p>
<p>Wow! I can’t imagine doing that! Gulp! I haven’t been that involved in his academics in years! I think I might have to stop sharing so much about him, but back in freshman year, after YEARS of micromanaging, we went with sink or swim, and he sunk in sophmore year, but then really pulled it together. This feels like going backward.</p>
<p>I was thinking if the next smester didn’t go well, with say 15 credits to start, maybe dropping to 12, we would go with changing his major…</p>
<p>That IS something to think about, and probably not now, since I am at work and dealing with kids a lot worse off than mine.</p>
<p>What we’re doing is similar to what a tutor would do. My son could do a much better job getting her brushed up on math (he’s tutored university math and science for several years) but she doesn’t like getting tutored by him. So I email her problems to do and instructions to brush up on and she does the work.</p>
<p>Our son has always worked on his classes ahead of time getting in a month or more of work done before classes start. Our daughter has picked up on this but isn’t as aggressive on her courses. I expect her to transfer elsewhere in the future and go with a major that’s easier than what she’s doing now.</p>
<p>Well, you could hire a tutor to do it.</p>
<p>Years ago I sat down w/my kid and had her redo Algebra I using the honors text, as my kid took ‘regular’ algebra and aced it handily, and I knew she was smart enough to do honors. We went through most of the text, she got caught up and without further intervention on my part she succeeded at honors HS math, then in college did well in Calc I and II.</p>
<p>This by the way is one very misleading aspect of HS math these days. Thank heaven I asked very pointedly whether my kid, having taken regular algebra and assuming she’d continue on to complete 4 years of the regular math track, would be ready for Calc I in college. They said NO. I was stunned. So I had 3 sit-down meetings with them, finally got her into honors math (prepped her for it so she’d succeed), then was permitted to enter her in honors sciences, which she did very well at.</p>
<p>This absolutely is one reason why so many kids drop out of engineering. They are cheated out of appropriate educations in HS and the HSs are not honest about it. (Her HS had a planned path for kids dropping down from honors, but no path for kids upgrading! Tough luck, late bloomers.) When those kids say hey, I’d like engineering, they find that they are not prepared for it.</p>
<p>Outside of doing the occasional problem with the kid, how else are we as parents supposed to know how well they are being prepared??</p>
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<p>Math is an appropriate dinner topic at our house.</p>
<p>If our daughter didn’t know something that I thought that she should know, I just gave her a problem on it. Sometimes I’d give her the same problem over and over again until she figured that it would be easier to learn it then be embarrassed. She is bright in math but doesn’t love it like our son does. I am fine with her in a non-math area but she just needs this one course for her degree. I started showing her the ideas behind calculus when she was fifteen. I would go through tangent lines and areas under curves in a white board over and over and over again. Some of it did stick.</p>
<p>Re: #242</p>
<p>You may want to ask him to do the placement test found here:</p>
<p>[Calculus</a> Placement Exam | Department of Mathematics at University of California Berkeley](<a href=“http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/placement-exam]Calculus”>http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/placement-exam)</p>
<p>A student who is ready to take calculus for math and engineering majors should score green on most or all of the questions found on the placement test.</p>
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<p>That is a disservice to many students. A student who takes regular “college prep” math (algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, trigonometry/precalculus) in high school should be ready for calculus as a freshman in college, which is the assumed “at grade level” math for college freshmen.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it seems that many high schools are cheating their students out of a good math education, given that nearly all colleges and universities need to offer precalculus math courses. Even Harvard offers a “slow calculus” ([Math</a> Ma / Mb](<a href=“http://www.math.harvard.edu/courses/index.html]Math”>Harvard Mathematics Department Administration and Finance)) course, covering a semester of calculus over a year.</p>
<p>Yeah, and who knows how well the college level precalc prepares them for calculus? The placement test (your post #247 link) should help out with that.</p>
<p>“Well, you could hire a tutor to do it.” - The could be worthwhile (especially since it would give some accountability for showing up for appt, being sure to work on problem areas not ignore). But you could also consider checking if free tutoring is available on campus. Often it is for freshman engineering classes. It may be group/drop-in, but that could be good too if he goes.</p>
<p>Free tutoring might be available on campus, but I understand Treetopleaf and ucbalumnus to be talking about what to do right now, tomorrow, before Shrinkson goes back to school and fails his classes.</p>
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<p>This cannot be said too strongly. He needs to have algebra, triangles, exponentials at his fingertips. </p>
<p>If you want online drills, ALEKS is a good review choice. I used it for precalculus when I decided to brush up on calculus through the Art of Problem Solving. It costs some modest amount per month.</p>
<p>We were pleasantly surprised to find that DD1’s flagship state university offers regular weekly study sessions with a TA (with required attendance if one is a scholarship recipient :-)) plus tutoring if needed. She’s talking a math class in the spring and since all the math sessions are in times where she’s in Architecture studio (12 hours a week for one class) the school assigned her a personal tutor grad student - for free - for a couple hours a week. Very impressive support.</p>
<p>I asked my son, who is a sophomore in engineering who took Physics I and Calc II together in the spring last year and he said the two classes had very similar material. I know you said he is determined to take Physics next semester, but if he could hold off on that, he could take Calc I and see how he did and if it didn’t go well then either get tutoring or take it again in the summer, then he would be more prepared to take Calc II and Physics I in the fall semester. Not sure how far back this would set him though, because I know there is no wiggle room in an engineering curriculum if you want to graduate in four years. My son’s school guarantees graduation in four years if you do exactly what you are supposed to but there’s no room for changing your mind about anything.</p>
<p>I have to say that I am really surprised that this school lets their students take Calc I and Physics I at the same time. Generally they have kids take Calc I and the next semester take Calc II and Physics I concurrently, as your son did. Either the Physics I class won’t use much calculus, or it’s a setup for failure.</p>
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<p>The catalog for the school lists calculus 1 as a co-requisite for physics 1, but the “normal schedule” for the student’s major lists calculus 1 in freshman fall, followed by calculus 2 and physics 1 in freshman spring.</p>
<p>It is generally a better idea to take physics 1 after completing calculus 1.</p>
<p>There are lots of schools that have Calculus 1 as a co-requisite for Physics 1 and students may need to do that to finish in four years. It may not be a good idea but it’s pretty common.</p>
<p>I found MATLAB very user friendly compared to the typical programming language. Maybe that was because I had FORTRAN when I was much younger and found it very easy (I was always debugging everyone else’s programs ;)). MATLAB is very self-contained and has a great help section. I taught myself what I needed for my thesis project.</p>
<p>For today’s tech-hooked kids it might not be as bad as some here are remembering their own programming course experiences to be.</p>
<p>FORTRAN is a lower-level programming language. I think that MATLAB basically gives you a lot more power per line of code.</p>
<p>It’s much easier to learn another language when you’ve already learned one language because you have learned the programming paradigm. Many people that haven’t programmed need time to get used to the environment and idea of programming.</p>
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<p>My kid’s comm college had Calc III as a co-requisite for Physics II (E&M) - so I guess this varies a lot from school to school, and in the case of comm colleges, the schools they are preparing students for transfer into.</p>