choatecolate

Hello,

I took pre calc in 11th grade HS and got a C or D. Really miserably bad at math. I will be taking calc at a community college this summer, 4 years after the pre calc HS class. I have a calc book and was wondering how i should go about brushing up my pre calc skills....

i know of khan academy, but is there a guide to learning pre calc? or at least what order i should tackle subjects in?

AUGirl

Check out MIT's Open Course Ware. They have a complete Calculus class and they say the only information you need to take it is high school Algebra and Trigonometry.

In high school I used Pre-Cal for Dummies. It was pretty helpful.

smorgasbord

Also, get Stewart's Calculus book and work through the problems.

oceanicole

Khan Academy has a ton of really helpful videos for all levels of math! I used those studying for the AP Calc exam and they helped a ton. You can see all of them at khanacademy.org!

TomServo

I found the Barron's Pre-Calc book to be very good BUT it was also full of typos. So how can it be so good, you ask? Well, it covered a lot of material including complex numbers, division of polynomials, trig, and more, and it covered it all pretty well. Like I said, it has a lot of typos and you need to make sure you recognize them, but reading that book prepared me very well. Before that I went through a book on ACT-level math to prepare for the ACT. I'd suggest starting with a book at that level and then moving onto the Barron's pre-calc book. Unlike virtually every other pre-calc curriculum, the Barron's book did not cover any calc-related topics at all, nothing on the limit concept or slope-secant lines, etc. But instead, it focused on a broad swath of material that three years later I draw from.

GrammerNazi

MIT OpenCourseWare paired with Khan Academy is a winning combo. Try to watch the lessons on a regular basis and take online practice tests (there are hoards of them if you took the time to look) pertaining to the specific chapter you're learning so you know you have a good grasp on the topic. Good luck!

spectastic

this website saved my arse in calc III. The professor managed to turn a 200+ classroom into a 20+ classroom - no exaggeration.

IT's also got diff eq, linear algebra, the whole nine yards. You can pretty much get all your college math from this website alone.

3weeks

Can you read the same thing repeatedly until you memorize it?

iborpastan

Khan Academy is awesome for pre-calc and calculus and you can definitely learn most of what you need (if not everything) with just Khan Academy. Unfortunately, opencourseware doesn't have precalc and it tends to require a lot of pre-calc knowledge (it's MIT, what do you expect :P ). Fortunately professors at MIT don't always assume that you know everything just because you're at MIT.

The hour long lectures make opencourseware more difficult to stick with. Especially if you're not a "math person" start with Khan Academy first. However, I didn't think of myself as a math person until I discovered opencourseware.

Make sure to do the online exercises on Khan Academy! Opencourseware also uploads exams, so definitely check that out as well! I also make sure to write down everything the professor writes on his chalk board since a lot of them do a very good job of putting up everything that's important. If you don't always have time to do practice problems, Opencourseware can still prepare you for classes on the same topics. Supplement all this with any decent math textbook and you'e good to go!