Plan for 3/4?

[Tomanomanous]

Hello, I was on hiatus for a while, but now I am back into school and serious. I've finished the methods course (with my own indepedent work), and I have a whole term after the holidays of other maths things to do, as in class I sit and everything comes as revision to me. Everything the teacher is teaching next term is stuff I already did at least a month ago. So I thought, I could do this:

September-October: Revise over some of the basics, like notation and sets, etc.
November: Do the polynomial section of 3/4 Methods.
November (After exams) - December: Do the exponential and logarithmic section, possibly also some circular functions.
December - February: Do the parts on differential and integral calculus.

How would this be for a start of the year to methods. I want to get some of the backbone down before the 2012 school year starts so I can do the best I can in specialist, too. I just hope I'm not biting off more than I can chew. How is this plan?

[b^3]

This is the exact situation and plan I had last year! but I was a couple of weeks earlier than this time. It does work and if you are doing fine and completely understand 1/2 then definetly move on, if you are ify on areas then don't move on yet. Make sure you do some spesh on the holidays aswell, if you can handle this for methods.

[Tomanomanous]

Ok. Sounds good. I want to do some specialist work too. The library has a textbook for those doing specialist by distance education, which is good, too. It's a heinemann though. I find heinemann VCE Zone rushes through topics too quickly with their exercises (I still like the textbook though, it's helpful, I got a pdf of it for methods 3/4).... I think I'm going to use a maths quest textbook.

As for units 1/2. I have found everything easy except for some of the interpretation and ambiguity of probability. I can antidifferentiate and find the derivates by rule in seconds, I find limits easy, too. Rates of change I did in methods but the graphs and relations section of further reinforced my knowledge of that. Circular functions I'm good with. Exponential and Logarithmic functons I am fine with. Quadratics, cubics, quartics and other power functions I am also good with. Also, I understand notation in seconds.

[REBORN]

I'd recommend focusing on your 3/4s but it's up to you...

[Tomanomanous]

I'm already half way through the Yr12 Methods course, i hope to cover Spesh soon as possible after finishing my year 12 methods course, then i will start by trying to complete the Spesh course. I will finish off my Maths Quest Methods 3/4 as soon possible then i would slowly use the essential books, and yes the same process with Spesh.

-Hopefully Sometime around term 4 (week 2) i might finish my 3/4 methods txt book
-Hopes i can start my 3/4 spesh txt book term 4 (week 3)


Sorry for hijacking this thread. Man you seem to have everything planned for Methods/Spesh, doing that sort of work; can give you a strong potential into earning great study scores .

Nah! You're not hijacking. I think it's incredible you're doing that! I think I faced the problem that I didn't really take action for my methods independent working until term 2, which is when my maths knowledge increased exponentially (as well as my exponential knowledge). Good job! You obviously have a hard yet good work ethic!

Yeah. I don't think I'm going to get incredible study scores. At the moment in psychology I'm probably only looking at a 35-37.

[Lasercookie]

I plan to finish the methods and specialist course over the holidays. I've already covered chunks of the 3/4 methods course in class.

I will delay starting until after the IT Applications and Physics exam (at this point in time I don't intend to study that hard for my year 11 exams).

My reason for going that far ahead is really because:
1. I can.
2. I'll be doing spesh over distance ed, which means I'll be self-studying anyway. Might as well start self-studying when I'm fully motivated.
3. I've got some first-year physics and maths textbooks to read next year that will require me to understand a bit of uni maths. I want to get VCE maths over with so I can get onto the more interesting stuff.

I've got it planned out to something like 3 chapters a week (depending on the content, might even go less than that) from mid November to January will get me through the courses pretty easily. I don't want to rush through it, going to keep it slow and learn it thoroughly.

I'll be using a different textbook to that used in class (Essentials for self-studying, Heinemann for school). I'll follow the teacher's pace  in class next year and I probably won't touch trial exams until Term 4.

[pi]

Honestly, I don't think there is much point in finishing the course before school starts (unless you go straight to trials), because you probably won't remember much/any of the prob that you do in August/September. That's something a few of my friends are finding.

[Lasercookie]

Honestly, I don't think there is much point in finishing the course before school starts (unless you go straight to trials), because you probably won't remember much/any of the prob that you do in August/September. That's something a few of my friends are finding.

Yeah, but I want to get it over and done with so I can read stuff like Stewart's Calculus and other stuff that interests me (and understand it well) without feeling guilty I should be doing methods/spesh stuff. That's my main reason.

[b^3]

I plan to finish the methods and specialist course over the holidays. I've already covered chunks of the 3/4 methods course in class.

I will delay starting until after the IT Applications and Physics exam (at this point in time I don't intend to study that hard for my year 11 exams).

My reason for going that far ahead is really because:
1. I can.
2. I'll be doing spesh over distance ed, which means I'll be self-studying anyway. Might as well start self-studying when I'm fully motivated.
3. I've got some first-year physics and maths textbooks to read next year that will require me to understand a bit of uni maths. I want to get VCE maths over with so I can get onto the more interesting stuff.

I've got it planned out to something like 3 chapters a week (depending on the content, might even go less than that) from mid November to January will get me through the courses pretty easily. I don't want to rush through it, going to keep it slow and learn it thoroughly.

I'll be using a different textbook to that used in class (Essentials for self-studying, Heinemann for school). I'll follow the teacher's pace  in class next year and I probably won't touch trial exams until Term 4.

Honestly, I don't think there is much point in finishing the course before school starts (unless you go straight to trials), because you probably won't remember much/any of the prob that you do in August/September. That's something a few of my friends are finding.

I think definetly starting the course (again as long as you can handel it) is a must, but don't do the entire course, it's just too much too fast. Make sure you understand everything you do because in the end of the day, it doesn't matter how fast you do it, it's wether you know what you're doing and get it right. And when you do finish, don't just stop doing stuff for that subject, scale back you work for it for a week or two, but do something, don't get slack like I did for methods, taking a month break from it when I finished the course around mid-year, just to forget probablility and have to re-learn it.

[b^3]

Honestly, I don't think there is much point in finishing the course before school starts (unless you go straight to trials), because you probably won't remember much/any of the prob that you do in August/September. That's something a few of my friends are finding.

Yeah, but I want to get it over and done with so I can read stuff like Stewart's Calculus and other stuff that interests me (and understand it well) without feeling guilty I should be doing methods/spesh stuff. That's my main reason.

Unfortunately VCE is a competition that doesn't reward going that further ahead in search of knowledge. But I feel what you mean laseredd, use that for your breaks from the silly parts of vce maths that we have to put up with (stupid probability )
EDIT: sorry about double post.

[Lasercookie]

Fair enough - I understand where you guys are coming from.

I'll ensure that I won't move onto the next topic unless I understand it - i.e. ditch my timeline. I'll just keep working and see where I end up by the end of the holidays.

I'll try not to get slack either.

[BoredSatan]

to be honest, the methods course IS NOT HARD.

what seperates the best from the rest is NOT how good you are at maths but how careful and detailed you are when doing the exams/sacs.

so if you are going to do the course early, theres no need to do EVERY question because that would just be a waste of time. But do half of them with full working, making sure you wont make any careless mistakes.

of course if you are struggling then do as much as you can..

[paulsterio]

BoredSaint is right, what separates the very best students and the good students in Mathematical Methods is not their knowledge or understanding of the course but it's the amount of silly mistakes and errors they make as well as raw experience of doing exams...etc

I personally think that if you go through it the first time, before you start on it, you do it properly, like don't take it half-heartedly because if you're in that situation, you're better off just letting it be and just keeping slightly ahead of school. Because if you don't do it in detail and you don't do it properly, but rather you're rote learning or memorising rather than understanding the concept, you will forget, and believe me you will - I think this is what Rohitpi was suggesting in his post.

In Methods, you can probably quite easily finish the whole course in detail over the holidays, but with Specialist Maths I'd advise against doing that purely because it's a subject that's much more disjointed than Methods, they have purely separate topics sometimes, not like how Methods is really all inter-related. You will forget a lot of Specialist Maths if you do it that way.

So maybe don't go through all the topics, but go through the important ones. In Specialist, go over the Integration, that's a topic that is heavily related to concepts, it's also the foundation to basically half of the Specialist course, then after that I'd go through the individual chapters such as Vectors, Complex Numbers, Graphs, Trig...etc. Kinematics/Dynamics aren't hard, so just let them be for now, you can do them in the June Holidays or the April Holidays

But if you don't have time, it will be much, much more beneficial to finish the Methods course so go all out on that