A Bit Concerned

[kaylak05]

I'm a pre-med student at a community college so I'm on a different path than most of you and have different requirements in order to get my associates degree before I transfer to a university for a bachelors degree.

I'm currently in a summer semester trigonometry class because my school requires you take trig before taking pre-calc because they combine pre-calc with some trig. Long story short, pre-calc requires prior knowledge of trig upon entry. My dilemma is that I currently only have an 80% in Trig which is the lowest grade I've gotten thus far. I know it's not terrible but if I can't grasp trig is there any hope for me in Pre-calc, Calc 1, and Calc 2? It could be the fact that it's an accelerated course that's causing me to fall behind but I don't know for sure. I'm obviously good enough to maintain a B but it's been a struggle passing the tests because there's some things I almost have the hang of but not quite.

I'm just worried that if the fact that it's a shorter class isn't what's holding me back then I'm not going to make it through my upcoming math classes.

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[wristbandMD]

I did not take a trig class, but skipped to pre-calc 2 (at my cc we had precalc 1 and 2). I can't speak for precalc 1, but I know in precalc 2 it seemed like a lot of the trig was covered as though we had not learned it previously.

In my calc 1 class we needed to know sin, cos, tan, and their inverses. It wasn't too difficult and there was a review chapter at the beginning that was very short. I didn't do the review but I did glance over it and it seemed that sin, cos, tan and inverses dominated it. The book was for calc 1 through 3, so I can only assume that calc 2 doesn't use much trig.

Like I said, I'm not quite sure what an actual trig course consists of. Is it equivalent to college algebra?

 

[LawNonTrad]

I took trig in 9th grade at my high school and precalc over the summer at my community college (before starting AP Calc AB in 10th and BC in 11th), and trig isn't really hugely necessary for calculus. I'm confident that most people could skip straight from advanced algebra to calc if they had a couple day cram session of trig principles (unit circle, etc.) My trig course combined both advanced algebra and trig, so it certainly wasn't just sin, cosine, tangent, etc. I'm not sure about the OP's course but most trig courses from my experience are more than simple trig. A lot of community courses actually combine trigonometry with advanced algebra (typically 70-80% advanced algebra and 20-30% trig. That's basically what my precalc course was during that summer. It prepared me well for calc.

I wouldn't worry about your precalc course if you have a solid grasp of trig basics. I think that math courses can be particularly difficult over the summer (more so than sciences) because the material is all presumably new to you and you only have one night at home to assimilate the topics covered in class before the next day's class brings even more stuff. Success in a summer math course for most people requires studying 4-5 hours every day after class, maybe even 6 if necessary. You should be doing every assigned homework problem and every extra problem that your textbook offers as well. Go to your prof's office hours and ask questions about problems that you have difficulty doing. When quizzes and exams are returned to you, ask your prof to go over them with you so you understand the concepts better for later quizzes/exams. I realize that your trig class is almost over but if you apply these principles in precalc then you should do fine. I found that my calc courses were actually easier than the summer precalc course that I took. Perhaps that's due to the fact that I had 35 weeks for each calc course in high school while I only had 5 for the summer precalc.

 

[kaylak05]

I did not take a trig class, but skipped to pre-calc 2 (at my cc we had precalc 1 and 2). I can't speak for precalc 1, but I know in precalc 2 it seemed like a lot of the trig was covered as though we had not learned it previously.

In my calc 1 class we needed to know sin, cos, tan, and their inverses. It wasn't too difficult and there was a review chapter at the beginning that was very short. I didn't do the review but I did glance over it and it seemed that sin, cos, tan and inverses dominated it. The book was for calc 1 through 3, so I can only assume that calc 2 doesn't use much trig.

Like I said, I'm not quite sure what an actual trig course consists of. Is it equivalent to college algebra?

I know all the concepts like the back of my hand. By concepts I mean the unit circle, sin, cos, tan, their inverses, the pythagorean identities and all the other necessary memorization. The only thing that brought me down was solving the problems. I've 4.0ed any algebra class I've ever taken so parts of trig were easy. If I all I need to know are the basic concepts than I'm fine. I was just worried because at my CC it's not just pre-calc is pre-calc w/ trig.