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From: Casey Hawthorne on 4 Apr 2010 20:48
From the book: "How to Succeed in College Mathematics - A Guide for
the College Mathematics Student", Richard M. Dahlke, Ph.D., 2008.

Main Idea:
He says that Calculus 12 is worthless, UNLESS it prepares the student
to write the AP Exam, either AB or BC.


From page 63:
Calculus AB has some content on elementary functions, but Calculus BC
does not, assuming this was learned well enough prior to the course.
All the calculus topics of Calculus AB are included in Calculus BC,
but the latter has additional topics. The calculus BC examination has
a Calculus AB sub-score.

Note: you can write the AP exam independently of whether you are
enrolled in an AP course.

The author gives several reasons to back up his claim.


From page 15:
Another interesting fact: in a one-semester college calculus course,
you may meet with your instructor in class for about 56 meetings
compared to a "yearlong" high school calculus course where you may
have about 180 meetings.


From page 33:
Calculus is not easy. Its built on a powerful and elusive idea,
namely, limit. You can manage calculus if you have the desire, the
prerequisites (not just on paper, but in understanding), and the
necessary study habits.


From page 333:
"You may think that the focus is to solve problems, which requires you
to make use of theory; but for college students it is the reverse
situation. In college, the focus is to learn the theory, which
requires you to solve problems.



Often, to solve a calculus problem, you need to do some "algebra
acrobatics", so if your grasp of grade school algebra is weak, you are
spending more time on the old concepts than spending your study time
learning the new calculus concepts.


Note: increasingly, calculus and linear algebra are BOTH becoming the
gateway to higher math courses. Calculus, dealing with rates of
change, is used in most of science and engineering which deal with one
quantity changing as another quantity changes, and linear algebra
dealing with mathematical objects that are linear (or can be
linearized) since computers can deal with the computations for large
linear systems. For example, statistics uses numerical linear
algebra, and statistics is used in machine learning.


:)
--
Regards,
Casey
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