Pre-Calculus Honors Accelerated (PCHA)
2021-22
Dr. Kessner

Grading

  • 50% group work
  • 50% individual assessments

Mathletes

As a PCHA student you are a mathlete, which means:

  1. You love math!
  2. You will participate in the California Math League (CML), which will consist of a series of six 30-minute tests over the school year. These will not be graded, but you will have bragging rights.
  3. You will participate in the American Mathematics Competitions (AMC), which will consist of a single written test one morning (with bagels) in the second semester.

Homework

You are not required to do every assigned homework problem. However, you are responsible for knowing how to do every problem. In other words, don’t waste your time on things you already know how to do, and spend time on the material where you need the most practice. If you skip problems, please make a note on your homework that you’ve skipped them (this is for you, not for me). I highly encourage you to write notes to yourself on your homework to remind yourself what to look out for as you prepare for assessments.

About the course

This is a fast-paced course, with a lot of material to cover to prepare you for AP Calculus BC next year. Because of the amount of material, we won’t always have time to do an example for every type of problem, and we might not get to discuss every homework problem in class. This puts more responsibility on you to make sure that you understand the material and that you are prepared for the next lesson. This class will be challenging, but I am here to help you. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions at all.

The benefit of moving so quickly in this course is that we will have the opportunity to think about a large variety of interesting ideas in mathematics. In addition, we will do some coding in Python and/or Javascript to explore some topics and have some fun with the ideas we discuss in class.