Administrators say they will allow individual departments to develop their own math requirements, while higher education experts and mathematicians hope the public university in Detroit will maintain a broad commitment to quantitative reasoning. Or you can find some good instruction on youtube.Wayne State University has suspended its requirement that all students take a mathematics course, striking at the heart of a debate over whether math should be a mandatory part of general education. But you can also ask your teacher to show you why that identity is true. Later you need to know some identities like sin 2(x)+cos 2(x)=1 (okay, maybe JUST that identity and no others). If your teacher and book lean really heavily on trig concepts, you may have to do some review sooner rather than later, but for most intro calc classes you just need to be able to graph sine, cosine, and tangent (maybe) and learn the mnemonic "All Students Take Calculus" (which tells you when each function is +1, 0, or -1). My own bias is that anything you don't get can be supplemented with the plethora of great videos by talented teachers on youtube (or khan academy).Įventually, you'll need to bone up on your trig, sure, but trigonometry makes a ton more sense once you can connect the concepts using calc! So it's not like trig HAS to come before calc, it's just that it's often taught that way. If you have a good teacher, you can get by with no precalc and limited trig. When I went through school, I got "Geometry," "College Algebra and Trigonometry," "Precalculus," and finally calc. It just went straight to calculus from where you're at right now. But the two things I outlined above are by far the most important.ĭepends a lot on the teacher, the book you're using, and your orientation to math! Since you're here asking the question, though, you may not have to worry much about that last item.įor most of history until only recently, there wasn't actually a precalculus class in most high schools or colleges.
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#All students take calculus how to
There are definitely other important things as well, like some basic trig identities that might help, and every year I find some of my seniors don't remember how to find the area of a fucking rectangle (literally half the course is about areas of rectangles).
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And typically this comes up in multiple choice questions where you absolutely need to simplify or you just won't get any credit at all. What you often wind up with are problems that produce some really, really ugly expressions that are downright intimidating, but are actually totally manageable if you just apply the math you've learned in previous courses. Since making a mess is kind of in the nature of the material, cleaning up your mess should be as well, right? One of the reasons that good calculus resources (like textbooks and tests) are so highly praised is because the problems are difficult to craft. This is an essential skill because you very often wind up with a really messy expression after you apply the things you learn in calculus.
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The hands-down biggest killer for most students though, is simplifying expressions. Questions about stuff like the end behavior of y=9|x|/x is pretty standard early on in the course. Easily identifying holes and asymptotes is crucial as well. The domain and range is a good start, but there's even more to it. The two most important skills you need to come into a calculus course with are function analysis, and simplifying complicated expressions.įunction analysis is a sort of fancy way of saying you really need to know everything about the graphs of pretty much any function you've ever seen before. I think the most important ones are the ones that seem to be repeated from Algebra 2. You'll find a lot of topics in the typical precalculus curriculum that don't really have a lot to do with calculus.