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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm, an interesting point. I'll note that my high school in the late '70s had only one term of the calculus at the end, and the fact that the teacher refused to teach, full stop, wasn't caught by something inconvenient like the independently administered AP tests.

My school system had dropped its honors program because it was "discriminatory", but somehow nowadays they offer 12 AP courses including Calculus AB, the sciences, literature and foreign languages, music, US history, etc.

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I'm currently coming out of high school (11 days until graduation), and, I haven't learned much. 6 AP courses are offered at my school, none of them are pushed on you until after you sign up for the class and decide that wasn't a good idea. I haven't ever done "real science". AP Physics B (non calculus) is the only ap science course offered, and it still was just "here's a lecture about physics, do your homework, few labs".

Sigh, algebra based non calculus physics is cargo cult science much in the original sense that Feynman started the meme. No one outside of education does it this way, or as I like to put it, there's a reason Newton invented the integral calculus to develop classical mechanics and why Edison couldn't compete with Tesla (self-taught Edison didn't have the math to do polyphase AC, which was the only practical approach back then).

Anyway, I feel your pain, I came out of my high school not having learned hardly as much as I wanted to or needed. At least I had some good to great math teachers until my senior year (that was a literal life saver along with a summer school course on a UNIX V6 machine). Senior year was a total loss with no insurance, or "It's a bad sign when JROTC is by far your most interesting and useful class."

How well have you learned your math? That's a key foundation.

I just finished a 2 year course on Physics from a high school that was algebra based. I'll attest that algebra based Physics is the biggest waste of time ever. The worst part, if you know some calculus, is that you can glimpse what is happening behind the scenes of the formulas they give you. All I really learned from the course was a shortcut for doing the homework problems: make your givens somehow come out to the units required by the solution; double or halve in special cases. I just hope that mindset won't get in the way when I take a real physics course.

Indeed; I now realize I was really lucky when I took my high school physics course in that the teacher didn't assign any homework, it was all lecture and an automatic A. So the next year when I did physics for real with the calculus I had nothing to unlearn.

Although at the same time due to the senior class math teacher having refused to teach I had to learn the calculus at speed, but I managed and it probably works better when you have real physics problems you're solving at the same time. E.g. I learned why trig is really important.

On math? I gave up a few years ago, borrowed some math texts from the library and taught myself up through single variable calculus. I still take the math courses at my school because I need the credits to graduate.

Great! If you now do calculus based classical mechanics and electrodynamics to cement it (you'll need some more calculus for the latter) you'll be in great shape. Ask if you'd like some book recommendations.

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