From: Marielouise (for Teacher2Teacher Service)
Date: Mar 25, 2001 at 17:55:45
Subject: Re: Trigonometry in sophomore year?

Your question:  are you asking too much of her to handle trig at her age and
grade level?   No, you are not asking too much of her.

However, I think that you must be in a place which has block scheduling so
that students take 90 minutes of a subject every day or something similar.

What might seem to be too much to handle might be because she is moving very
quickly through the subject.   There is considerable disagreement about
block scheduling in such academic areas.   English, history, social studies
and science are areas that like  large blocks of time devoted to a subject.
However, English and socials studies suffer from there not being enough
weekends or vacations to catch up on extended reading.   Music, foreign
language and mathematics frequently prefer the shorter daily recitation
periods that cover longer periods of time throughout the school year.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that mathematics should not be dropped for
an entire semester. It needs to be taken every semester.

How are other students doing in the course? Can they stand the pace?

If your daughter likes math she should certainly plan to take precalculus
and calculus or some other course in statistics or probability. The latter
might be taught in the framework of a finite mathematics class.

Support your daughter.  Get her help if she needs it.

 -Marielouise, for the T2T service

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