Algebra 1 to Calculus? Big Ambitions.

DadTwoGirls
Sat, 09 Sep 2017 02:49:17 +0000

Calm down.

Math is a subject that probably more than any other subject what you will learn next week is based on what you learned last week and last year, and what you are going to learn next year is going to be based on what you learn next week (and last week and last year). As such, you do not want to skip ahead, you want to take things at a correct and normal pace.

There have been posts on CC about students who took calculus as a high school sophomore and failed, or at least got a bad grade. This put them into a bad place. A LOT of what you will study in the future will be based on algebra and probably (depending upon your major) also on calculus. You need to get a very solid basis in these subjects through thoughtful study over a period of years.

Also, the Ivy League represents 8 very good universities in a country with hundreds of very good universities. Harvard, MIT, and Stanford all have strong math programs, but two of them are not Ivy League and taken together (along with the remaining 7 Ivy League schools) they don’t have a monopoly on calculus, algebraic topology, stochastic processes, linear algebra, special or general relativity, or anything else. There are LOTs of other very good schools.

As one input: I did not take calculus in high school. I got a very solid foundation up through pre-calculus in high school, then took calculus in university. I still got into top universities, and ended up being a math major at a very highly ranked university. Having a solid foundation was much more important than skipping ahead.