Can any of you whose kid has taken or is taking AP BC Calculus recommend any study aids or books? We need this more for the class material than the AP exam at this point. The teacher I mentioned awhile back has been giving crazy hard tests with little assistance, and no homework points to help counteract the low test scores. Long story, but in any event, the midyear report going to schools is not going to be good and I am worried for S. But I want to get him some Calculus help for the rest of the year. Iād appreciate any book or website recommendations.
@PAO2008, sorry my D took Calc AB, but we have gotten the Princeton review books in the past for history and econ.
@PAO2008 I could have written your post. Ditto the no help! Ugh. Good luck I hope your son gets some help. I think we have determined my daughters teacher gets a lot of laughs out of this misery. He couldnāt understand how more than 3/4 of all of his classes have dropped. He has 4 classes ranging from Pre-Cal to AP Calculus and only 15 students now. My daughters class has dropped down to 3.
@PAO2008 My daughter highly recommends The Calculus Lifesaver by Adrian Banner. It is $16 on Amazon. It covers Calculus 1 and 2 (AB & BC). There are also youtube videos of him teaching review sessions for Princeton math classes.
@PAO2008 & @Sophmore1 us too! Ugh!
@PAO2008,http://archives.math.utk.edu/visual.calculus/ Visual Calculus
I found this, might this be helpful for him to go over concepts on his own again?
Highly recommend Calculus One and Several Variable by Salas/ Hille
You can pick it up cheap on Amazon used. The copy I have the the 6th edition and used it was less than a dollar plus shipping.
@mysonsdad - unfortunately, the perfect scores donāt seem to have the same cache that people normally expect to go with it. It seems to help with number oriented schools like Caltech and may be one or two others but I have noticed that even Caltech seems to ignore few perfect scorers altogether (I know of one with both SAT and ACT perfect scores who was deferred). I donāt think too highly of your local private which seems to pass over seemingly perfect candidates for scholarships without any clear guidelines. It is a tough world out there with all the holistic process schools and their wannabe emulators.
@PAO2008 - S is in B/C. Unfortunately, heās off at a Kairos retreat this week and left most of his stuff in his locker at school, so I canāt see what heās using. His teacher ditched the standard curriculum and texts and is using one she found elsewhere thatās mostly photocopies, so thatās likely not too helpful. I know S has watched the Khan Academy videos, though. Thereās a whole section on Integral Calculus that has some good video clips. Heās also had luck searching for the particular concept on YouTube.
What your S is dealing with sounds like what my S is working with in AP Physics. New teacher, last-minute hire, doesnāt fully get it. S is doing self-study, and then teaching his classmates over Facetime at night, or in the AP Calc teacherās room. Definitely not optimal. Heās finding good online video resources for that too, though.
IDOC: We have two schools which use it, out of a total of ten (Sās nine, Dās one and only). I have no idea what Iām doing with it. One school sent a reminder to fill it out āso we can get to work on putting together a financial aid package!ā It sounds like a likely letter, but they could be toying cruelly with us.
In better news, D just received notice that she has been awarded a Founderās Academic Scholarship worth $21, 000 a year, renewable as long as she keeps a B average, plus another $2500 . That is sooo helpful! We liked this school to begin with but theyāre really just endearing themselves more and more as days go one.
No suggestions on Calc BC books, but it looks like a couple of people have weighed in. S took BC online, and his teacher was horrid. He may as well have self-studied. Actually, he probably would have been better off.
@Mysonsdad I often wonder about students like your sonās friend, a student with stellar stats like that, yet consistent rejects. In those cases, I would look toward things like essays and LoRs. Something is holding him back and since most elite schools are holistic, it looks like something subjective is in his way. My sister is an editor who works with professors who need editing before their papers go to journals. Once in awhile she will get a request from a client for her to work with their child on college application essays. These students are most often top of the top at their schools with highly educated parents and at highly ranked high schools. She said she has worked with about 20 apps over the years. This year she had two. She said that the quality of essays writing is unbelievably bad, enough to keep them out of top schools. It is not just the writing itself, but the content. The essays are bland, and totally miss the point. They tend to all be the same as well.
Did anyone look over this kids app before it went in?
Also, were any mistakes made on the application itself. For example, my son, as well as others on CC, found that the Common App was cutting off the last paragraph of cut and pasted essays. My son discovered a work around, but I wonder if many people missed that. He told me after the fact that this was an issue.
@2manybooks My son was on Kairos last weekend. Must be that time of year! He really enjoyed it and it seemed like many of the boys got a lot out of it, which is cool. Can I ask what he is using for self-study Physics because my S is in the same boat with that and is telling me he will be getting a C. He did eke out an A last semester, so thereās that.
@LKnomad That is interesting. All I can say is that back in the day, I had to take a freshman writing class. It really irked me as I was a direct admit to the Journalism school, so it seemed silly that I had to take it. I was shocked at the stuff I saw when we had to pass around our papers for feedback.
Yes, D had to keep fixing them and missed endings for a couple of lottery school short essays. So it goes.
I donāt remember this last paragraph problem with essays. Will you be able to see it when you preview essay? She had two lines on the second page for main essay, but I donāt remember any other problems.
Congratulations to all for all the recent good news! I am happy to report that my son heard a positive response yesterday from his Cal State of choice, so I think we are pretty much done. His other choices were out of state publics, so both he and our pocketbook are happy. I would like him to go look at it one more time, but it is clear in his mind that he is ādoneā. The sweatshirt has been ordered 
@LKnomad I was thinking the same thing about the LoRās and the recommendations, but it is too late to change it now. I really feel bad for the kid. This is the same kid that I said had a fellow classmate who has everything go his way. The good news is, that just because he was not offered scholarships does not mean he is not accepted.
Congratulations @GoldenWest
Congrats on the decision @GoldenWest
@CAMidwestMom - Iām at work right now, but Iāll see what i can find about AP Physics when I get home. I know that Khan Academy videos are one component, along with a really weird YouTube video series where a guy has sped up the recording of himself talking and has edited the videos so heās also sitting in chairs (a few times) dressed up as a student. Silly, but evidently good Physics. S usually figures out the topic (friction and inclines last week) and googles for resources.
The teacher just picked up an online textbook and a really useless online āhomeworkā system - points are deducted for asking for hints or for checking oneās work, but the content itself isnāt even being taught at all. As of his departure for Kairos, S was already plotting for how to get ahead of the game by a day or so, and come up with a plan for the rest of the semester for himself and his classmates. Heās going to get an Exam Prep book so he knows the scope of what he needs to study.
Itās bad. S is doing OK, but he inherited a mind that just āgetsā this stuff from the other end of the gene pool. Heās profoundly offended by how itās affecting his classmates.
Iāll see what we have at home and post it then. Good luck to your S! This stuff isnāt fun at all.
The specific issue was with cutting and pasting an essay, short or long in the windows. You would paste and when you go back to see, the very last paragraph was getting chopped off. A work around was to copy just the last paragraph and make it part of the previous one, then separate them. This was happening with several school supplement essays. If one did the apps one at a time checked each one and submitted, it is easy to ensure they are all fine despite commonappās mess up, but when you are submitting 6 of them on January 1st at 11.45 PM, ā¦
@Ballerina016 you would be able to tell when you did that last preview before submission. The paragraph would simply not be there.