I’ve been researching independent study programs but I haven’t been able to find any so far that have the option of taking only one class through independent study and the rest through a public high school. I know that a large part of this is district-dependent and school-dependent, but I figured it was worth asking since there could be online programs available to people in a variety of districts. I would also love to hear about other people’s experiences in programs like this, even if the program isn’t available to me.
My school year is about to start so I guess there’s a pretty low chance of me being able to do anything for this coming year, but maybe the other years something could be worked out?
In my perfect world, I would be able to meet with an instructor for maybe a couple hours a week and self study. What I’m looking for is a program where I can go at my own pace for math, but still go to a public school and have the whole experience.
Note that I am in California and being eligible for CSU and UC schools is very important to me
In short: I want to be able to go at an accelerated pace in math, beyond what my school offers, but I don’t want to leave my school entirely.
irrelevant stuff between lines of asterisks*
Long backstory/rant, if anybody cares, but don’t feel like you ought to read this, I really just want to get this off my chest:
I feel like I’m going to be really bored for the remainder of my high school math classes, I really love math and it’s fun for me to just try things and see what happens (for example, last week I figured out a general way to use matrices to reflect a vertex matrix over a line in y=mx+b form-- just because I found it interesting). I feel like I could possibly manage taking Calc AB next year since I’ve already been doing extremely, extremely basic calculus-like concepts (basically just the power rule and some simple applications, like finding extrema).
I taught myself a lot of Algebra 2/trig concepts, and all I have left is part of conics, part of probability, statistics, and a bit of trig review. Next year I will be enrolled in algebra 2 trig. I’m doing online precalc next summer but I looked at the syllabus and I know the majority of it, and a fair portion of what I don’t know is arguably irrelevant (topics like “famous arithmetic sequences throughout history”-- really?)
My school does two year calculus so AB covers first semester (over a HS year) and BC covers second semester (over another HS year). The fact that I’m pretty close to being calculus-ready and yet I will only have one year of calculus complete over the next three years is pretty discouraging to me, since I feel like I could do so much more.
It’s not that I want to “impress colleges” or whatever, really, I genuinely want to learn the material and I would rather not wait such a long time. I just honestly find it to be very interesting and I’ve tried to play with calculus concepts before but haven’t been able to get very far since I don’t know very much about it.
Also, I seriously need to establish a baseline for myself. It’s slightly driving me crazy that I have absolutely no perspective. What I mean by this, is that I’ve basically been told multiple times that I can’t do it but I think I did? I just want (need?) to know once and for all that I either A) Have indeed accomplished what I think I have, or B) Have weak spots in specific places, so I can correct them. I’d kill to be able to spend a few hours going over what I think I know with a math teacher.
TL;DR: Current placement is irritating to me
Sorry for the huge rant but I really wanted to vent about that and my friends cannot relate to loving math, haha.
Anyway, if anybody has any suggestions or relevant experiences to share, I’d love to hear it.