<p>I have a horrible Alg II teacher this year, and he always teaches us to just plug functions in our graphing calculators. This has made it pretty easy for me to get an A in his class, but I fear I am not building a strong foundation for later math levels. I’ve read my textbook and have a cursory understanding of how certain variables affect the positions/attributes of parabolas and exponential functions, but if I was stuck in a test without a calculator I would not know how to do it. </p>
<p>Is this a dangerous way to learn, and should I self-study these concepts more thoroughly? Or is a cursory understanding sufficient?</p>
<p>On another note, I am taking pre-calc this summer to try and advance to AP Calc before college. What topics should I self-study prior to the class so I will be ready for the material? (It’s at a local university, so I don’t wanna screw it up)</p>
<p>Yes. Try to get as much as possible out of every math class you take, because it invariably will be useful in future math classes. It’s really good that you’re thinking about this stuff now, because many people don’t and get boned later.</p>
<p>One way to learn phase shifts etc. – or at least what worked for me back then – is by mentally plugging values into those equations until you’ve got an intuitive grasp of what variables do what. Just think about stuff like “well, f(x) has the value f(5) at 5, but if you have the function f(x-3), it’ll shift stuff rightwards by 3 because it’ll have the value f(5) at 8 and f(2) at 5.” You’ll want that sort of intuition later on.</p>
<p>Algebra II itself is good preparation for pre-calc since half of pre-calc is review of Algebra II. But if you want to learn pre-calc early a good book is “College Algebra and Trigonometry” (I forget the author, but now they’re publishing a book called “Precalculus” instead.) Read the textbook and follow the chapter outlines and you should be fine.</p>
<p>Darn, I feel guilty now for my curt message. </p>
<p>Okay, I have another way for you to develop your skills:</p>
<p>Have a friend construct a graph of a parabola, hyperbola, exponential growth or decay function, logarithmic function, etc. and you will try to find the equation to it. If you can do that, I’d say you have a good grasp.</p>
<p>Yeah, and remember that a ton of colleges don’t allow calculators, so I’d practice the basics (and stuff later on) without one. It’s definitely easy to rely on them too much- practice mental math and you will be GLAD later on.</p>
<p>For example… Our AP Calc teacher likes declaring that our calculators are ‘broken.’ He’s a big one for no-calculator tests.</p>
<p>You go over all that shift and alg II crap again in PreCalc, so I wouldn’t sweat it so much unless your PreCalc teacher is the same as your Alg II teacher.</p>
<p>try to undersatnd it all, and understand what the calculator is doing. otherwise, as marimare said, you will die in basically very math class you take thereafter</p>
<p>agree w/most of the above…also, i’ve noticed that people who only get by on knowing Part A separate from Part B without knowing WHY they do it often get screwed when Part A is combined with Part B to be put into a Part C equation. Yeah.</p>
