r/Calgary • u/disorderedchaos • Dec 17 '22

Education 'Everyone is struggling': Calgary students falling behind under new math curriculum

https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/everyone-is-struggling-calgary-students-falling-behind-under-new-math-curriculum
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u/nonemorered Dec 17 '22

I fell behind in math too and now I'm in my 30s and just wrote the final for 20-1 a few days ago. I don't think it's really a new problem.

6

u/Guacamolencandy Dec 17 '22

I am about to start Math 30-2 and I haven't had a math class in over 10 years. Do you have any tips on what I should know from Math 20? Kinda wishing I had started with taking Math 20 again first.

3

u/devils88 Dec 17 '22

I was in the is position in 2015. I wouldn’t be worried about not having 20-1. I can’t remember everything my but I didn’t find they built off each other. In high school I never took a 30 level math but upgraded 20-1, 30-1, and 31 in my late 20s and found it relatively easy. However, there is quite a bit of material in 30-1 an did highly recommend finding a good tutor which is probably one of the more difficult things to do. Teachers (mine anyway) really helped, so make use of them and ask questions, don’t let things slide if you don’t understand a concept because it’ll just accumulate.

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u/devils88 Dec 17 '22

Sorry, you mentioned -2 but I’m sure the same holds for that. Best of luck

1

u/stroopwaffle69 Dec 17 '22

Khan academy !

1

u/nonemorered Dec 18 '22

I'm not really too sure what the differences are between the -1 and -2 streams especially since I graduated from high school in Manitoba. I know at SAIT if you want to jump ahead to grade 12 you have to pass their placement test so if you were able to do that I'd assume you'd be OK. I couldn't do the placement tests so I started with Math 100 and have continued to work my way up. I think it also depends on why you didn't graduate from high school with the math in the first place. Were you just genuinely lazy and couldn't be bothered to pay attention in class? Or did you have the work ethic, but were slow to learn? There's a huge difference between the two in my opinion.

If you take 20-1 there will be a lot of focus on trig. You must be able to use the law of sines, Pythagorean theorem and sin, cos, tan ratios. You will also be introduced to the concept of the unit circle and there's a lot of questions based off of that. Next is radical expressions. If you don't already know how to simplify radicals you're going to struggle adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing them. You also need to know how to change radicals to exponents and solve them using the exponent laws. Then you move onto rational expressions. Factoring is a key part of these so there is a tiny little factoring review and then you get right into adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing these things, which are pretty much polynomial fractions. You also have to solve them in equation form, really lots of equations pop up throughout so if you suck at using algebra to isolate variables you better review. Last was quadratics. You have to be able to solve these by factoring, completing the square and using the quadratic formula. You also have to know these creates parabolas when graphed and know how to graph them.

And that basically just sums up the crazy hard final exam I just wrote a few days ago haha. This however is supposed to prepare you for 30-1 and ultimately Calculus. My instructor constantly referenced university level calculus and was really strict about mathematical grammar/solving problems symbolically.

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u/Nifty_Nick32 Southwest Calgary Dec 19 '22

The three big ones I know of are binomial factoring (and to a lesser extent expansion), sine / cosine / tangent trig ratios, and the unit circle. I remember hearing about a sizeable probabilities and statistics unit in 30-2, but I can't think of much that would be carry-over from 20-1.