For the Student from a Student
Hi! So I’m guessing you are either 1) about to start this semester and have begun to read the textbook (kudos to you) or 2) you are halfway through the semester and have somehow stumbled across this tab looking for help. Regardless, you are in the right place!
I like to call this textbook the “behind the scenes of math.” Since this textbook is designed to relate concepts to one another, concepts will click in your head that haven’t before. For instance, if you struggled with geometry in high school, the geometry section in this book does an amazing job at giving not only a geometric point of view, but an algebraic stance as well so that you can better relate math concepts across multiple domains.
To give you a little summary of this textbook, it starts off with basic math concepts that you most likely learned in high school. It does stretch your knowledge of the concepts a little bit, but nothing that you can’t handle. Before you get too comfortable, it quickly jumps into concepts that you have most likely not seen before. You will soon realize that a field is more than something students play on, a ring is more than a pretty diamond given on the day of a proposal, and a group is more than a gathering of people. While these new concepts might seem daunting at first, you will get through it, I promise. After you have dug into the nitty gritty of algebra, geometry is not far behind. As you will soon find out, geometry builds on many algebraic concepts that you are already familiar with. You will learn how to express geometric ideas in various forms so that you can easily switch back and forth between them. At the end of the textbook, you will learn how to properly analyze data, and learn how to collect it yourself (quite the breather). By the end of this whole book, you will have a much deeper understanding of high school math, which will better prepare you for your future mathematics classroom!!
From the point of view of former students, let me give you their tips and tricks on how to succeed when working through this textbook.
- Read the whole textbook
- Hold study sessions
- Don’t be afraid to go to office hours
- Do the exercises in the textbook and come to class with questions
- Study well in advance
- Know each other’s strengths so that you can hold well-rounded study groups
- Learn to love triangles
As you know, so much of teaching is about collaboration and communication. As you will soon find out, or have already found out, this textbook will push you mathematically. Lean on each other, and get comfortable in the unknown.
Let me go ahead and get you excited with concepts that you have probably never thought about before. Hint: most of these answers might surprise you.
- Is the set of positive rational numbers bigger than the set of natural numbers?
- Is \(\overline{.9} =1\)?
- How many different geometric transformations are there?
- Can you ever truly be random?
So now, go ahead, dive in and see how complex 2+2 really is!