<p>My junior year is coming up and I will be taking AP Calculus AB. I struggled with PreCal and Trig although I was able to get an A both semesters. I am in Mu Alpha Theta and going to the convention inspired me to get better in math. My teacher that I have now will be my math teacher for the rest of high school. My teacher does not explain topics well at all and can get an attitude very easily. During the summer, I want to relearn as much math as I can from Algebra 1 to PreCal and Trig. Do anyone know any good books that explain the concepts well? </p>
<p>Well honestly, the school textbooks aren’t typically that bad for basic concepts. However, if/when you reach the point where you need some more unique problems, the AOPS books are good. The AOPS Intermediate Algebra and AOPS PreCalculus would be good for you, but be forewarned, they can be difficult to understand. </p>
<p>These aren’t books lol, but you could always watch videos from Khan Academy and the Brightstorm or PatrickJMT channels on YouTube. They’re all really good.</p>
<p>^^^^Yeah, when I was gone from school for a while, I went on Khan Academy to learn what I was supposed to so I could keep up with the homework. I highly recommend that site.</p>
<p>If you like watching Khan Academy, then don’t watch Khan Academy and watch PatrickJMT. He does a better job and doesn’t leave “careless mistakes”. Any sane person would just edit the video so there is no “careless mistake” but apparently Khan is insane.</p>
<p>I think the idea is that seeing where someone else makes careless mistakes will help you avoid making them yourself. It’s a good idea to watch videos from multiple sources, partially because seeing something more than once will help you understand it better, but mostly because there are things Khan Academy doesn’t cover that other people do (off the top of my head, I don’t think he goes into enough detail with polar coordinates).</p>
<p>That argument would work if he was consciously making those mistakes but he isn’t. Also, it loses his credibility. How are people trying to learn the information supposed to know what he is saying is correct? Save the confusion. Even my teachers tell us to avoid him.</p>
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I agree if you’re talking about uncorrected mistakes. Mistakes are only beneficial when the teacher realizes what they’ve done and corrects it quickly. </p>
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What kind of mistakes does he make? Are they like arithmetic errors, or does he mess up fundamental concepts?</p>
<p>I like Khan Academy sometimes, partially because he writes everything out by hand (for some reason I have more trouble learning when teachers lecture from PowerPoints) and partially because he almost never goes over my head like some college lectures do. If I’ve read my textbook and the topic still doesn’t click with me, I usually go see if Khan Academy has anything about it, because he works really hard to provide an intuitive/“visualizable” idea of what’s going on. At other times he seems too slow paced.</p>
<p>He makes arithmetic errors. He probably does make errors in explaining concepts too but those are harder to spot. And when he makes a mistake, it is not until the end he realizes he made a mistake. Sometimes he says ‘I must have made a careless mistake somewhere but you get the idea’ because the final answer is incorrect. Arithmetic mistakes should not be shrugged away since they can be extremely detrimental when in an explanation of a new operation or function (cross product, laplace transform, etc.).</p>