I wish you all success!
Now, a question.....
I don't know the details of the particular courses you are taking, and what it means by "Precalculus" , but is Mathematics taught in the USA as a series of separate subjects?
(I have never seen the word "precalculus" in any maths text-book old or new so I assume it is a term used by the designers of your particular course. It looks a bit like "pre-ordering" and its ilk.)
I have noticed this apparent fracturing of Mathematics in many messages about education in the USA, and yours adds to that.
Clearly, you cannot learn Calculus unless you can understand Equations and Algebra generally; indeed you cannot study much Maths without Algebra, from simple, practical formulae like Ohm's Law upwards. And the higher the maths and particularly its uses, the more the links between topics.
Yet it has long looked to me as if US schools and colleges at least, if not universities too, break Mathematics into each topic being its own curriculum subject with its own examinations: one in Algebra, one course in Trigonometry, in Percentages, in Geometry, etc..
Is that so?
Is there any particular reason or advantage to doing that, since many maths topics and certainly the practical uses of maths, are interconnected in many ways?
I have asked this quite a number of times but not yet read a definite answer, as if my question mystifies people!
Very different from my own experinece, in the UK. I was taught Maths both at school in the 1960s, and some thirty years later as an adult-student taking the standard school-curriculum Maths course and examination for work reasons. Although the two syllabi differed significantly in contents and difficulty, both treated maths as a cohesive, single subject called "Mathematics". Each covered all those topics and others, ending in an examination that embraced its entire syllabus.
