Why take my Pre-Calculus Honors Summer Enrichment course?

Precalculus Honors has become one of the hardest courses in Mathematics at WW-P.  I have seen tears, anxiety over the subject and a lack of self-esteem.  Students who I have known to be mathematically smart tell me that they don’t feel smart and that they are not good at Mathematics. 

What are the solutions to this problem?

• Be very mindful of the course you will be taking.  Why are you taking this course? Do you want to take on a STEM focused career? If you do not like Mathematics, why not take the college prep course (which still covers topics necessary for standardized tests such as the SAT) and focus on Honors courses that are relevant to your interests?
• If you do have to take Precalculus Honors, how do you prepare yourself to tackle the topics effectively when the time comes? As someone who has taught thousands of students over the last decade, I believe one can grow one’s mathematical aptitude with the right mindset, perseverance, and grit and exposure to challenging problems multiple times.

While my course is primarily based off of the WW-P curriculum, students last year from other highly rated school districts such as Princeton and South Brunswick, reported that the course significantly helped students understand the tougher concepts of Trigonometry. Some of these school districts start with reviewing Algebra 2 material and only start the harder topics of Trigonometry in January.

I am aware that my one-on-one tutoring may be expensive for some parents, and the reason I started offering these summer courses was to offer something that will be more affordable to parents to get students to feel more confident in the course going in.  I had offered a jumpstart course (first month of material)the last two years but I feel that a lot of the students could have benefited from learning the first 3 months of material which is generally one bit harder than the rest of the school year.  Deep Dive was created to solve this problem. This is an incredible value (less than half the price of my one-on-one classes) for being taught by a teacher from HSN/HSS who was consistently rated highly effective in the 7 years of teaching in the district.