People who did/doing Further with Methods/Specialist

[Einstein]

Im currently in year 11 doing FM as a 3/4. Im quite strong in Maths (100% Methods Unit 1 Exam and High Distinction in the UNSW test) and 100% on CORE part of Further.

However i am currently doing geometry and trig, and to be honest ive never been good with surface area, composite shapes, its very tedious, and even some sine/cosine questions are getting trickier, and i am struggling to answer some of them. Is this any sign im plainly not good at maths? its just frustrating how you have to calculate all these different parts etc.

I plan on doing Specialist next year, and is this a sign i shouldnt?

Anyone who has done Further, and went on to do Specialist/Methods/good score in Further, did you struggle in any parts of the course?

Thanks 

[spectroscopy]

For circular functions ( not so much area sorts of things), but things like sin, cosine,
all it takes to get good at this topic, or at least go from struggling to understand, to understanding it, is not memorising formulas; but learning the concepts behind it all, how the unit circle works, etc. I used to suck at it but then an old tutor of mine explained how it all worked and in 15 minutes suddenly everything made sense.

id say just sit down with your teacher at lunch or after school and try to get them to explain the conceptuality of things. better yet - if there is a specific thing you dont understand why you do it, flat out say "why? show me a proof please" and odds are it will make sense. and if they cant explain it in a way that clarifies, have a session with a tutor or something?

just my experience good luck

[~V]

Im currently in year 11 doing FM as a 3/4. Im quite strong in Maths (100% Methods Unit 1 Exam) and 100% on CORE part of Further.

However i am currently doing geometry and trig, and to be honest ive never been good with surface area, composite shapes, its very tedious, and even some sine/cosine questions are getting trickier, and i am struggling to answer some of them. Is this any sign im plainly not good at maths? its just frustrating how you have to calculate all these different parts etc.

I plan on doing Specialist next year, and is this a sign i shouldnt?

Anyone who has done Further, and went on to do Specialist/Methods/good score in Further, did you struggle in any parts of the course?

Thanks 

I'm similar to you, quite decent at Core and some other modules but SUCK at geometry. Last year when i did general maths b, I've gotten very close to full marks for Core, linear programming (95% +)and suprisingly 80s for bearings and trigonometry. But, geometry and measurement really killed me, i found it tedious and frustrating. I guess doing 'bad' in one module in further shouldn't discourage you from spesh... aren't you supposed to do Gen A then you can do spesh 3/4?? Also, 100% in a methods exam is really good, your further scores don't really have a strong correlation to a spesh score, there's a closer link to methods imo. You have to consider the fact that doing 3 maths, one of your maths must be in your 10% increment. I know someone doing all 3 maths in year 12, funny because she's far from the best in further, alright in methods and fine in spesh. It really depends on the person. Even though i don't do all 3 maths, just my 2 cents.

[Einstein]

For circular functions ( not so much area sorts of things), but things like sin, cosine,
all it takes to get good at this topic, or at least go from struggling to understand, to understanding it, is not memorising formulas; but learning the concepts behind it all, how the unit circle works, etc. I used to suck at it but then an old tutor of mine explained how it all worked and in 15 minutes suddenly everything made sense.

id say just sit down with your teacher at lunch or after school and try to get them to explain the conceptuality of things. better yet - if there is a specific thing you dont understand why you do it, flat out say "why? show me a proof please" and odds are it will make sense. and if they cant explain it in a way that clarifies, have a session with a tutor or something?

just my experience good luck

its not that im struggling, i understand how each concept works, but there are some questions (near the end) of each exercise that i stumble on. This is due to it requiring many steps before you get your answer  (for example you have a triangle, youll have to first find the angle before you find the side etc, though it is more complicated then just that).

I'm similar to you, quite decent at Core and some other modules but SUCK at geometry. Last year when i did general maths b, I've gotten very close to full marks for Core, linear programming (95% +)and suprisingly 80s for bearings and trigonometry. But, geometry and measurement really killed me, i found it tedious and frustrating. I guess doing 'bad' in one module in further shouldn't discourage you from spesh... aren't you supposed to do Gen A then you can do spesh 3/4?? Also, 100% in a methods exam is really good, your further scores don't really have a strong correlation to a spesh score, there's a closer link to methods imo. You have to consider the fact that doing 3 maths, one of your maths must be in your 10% increment. I know someone doing all 3 maths in year 12, funny because she's far from the best in further, alright in methods and fine in spesh. It really depends on the person. Even though i don't do all 3 maths, just my 2 cents.

I never did the 1/2 for further but i can see where your coming from. Last year in maths our first topic was 3d trig, and their was also some geometry (forgot the name) and it was my least scoring test for the whole year.

[Professor Polonsky]

Multi-part and multi-step questions are a large part of both Methods and Spesh. I'd advise you not to get discouraged so early, though.

[Einstein]

Multi-part and multi-step questions are a large part of both Methods and Spesh. I'd advise you not to get discouraged so early, though.

i Know what you means, but with further its really tedious, first you got to calculate the area of the circle then the cylinder etc, i find methods multi step questions easier like factorise this cubic equation (find a factor, long division, factorise..)

[Furbob]

I did Further with Methods and I had geometry as one of the units taught by my school

I found geometry to be the most trick-prone topic when it came to exams so I switched to doing matrices (which is very fool proof when you have a calculator) and discussed it with my teacher for approval. Eventually some students followed me and switched out of doing geometry to matrices for the exam. It was probably the best decision I made for further and if you've done matrices in methods then you dont even need to study it from the further textbook.

If you're curious I ended up doing number patterns, linear graphs and matrices (topics 1,3,6) and I found it the easiest combination personally

so if you're not comfortable with geometry you can always swap to a different topic that isnt taught by your school *cough*domatricesitstheeasiesttopic*cough*

[Einstein]

We're doing Matrices, Geo+Trig, and Graphs+Relations. I want to switch geo+trig for something, but ive heard networks to be bullshit, business maths to be full of tricky+hard questions and not sure about number patterns.

[Furbob]

number patterns is probably the easiest after matrices imo since it involves basic algebraic formulas and just careful interpretation of the question to put the right values in the formula

all the topics are very self-learnable with a good background in maths and you have plenty of time to look at it yourself

up to you~!

[Professor Polonsky]

Completely agree with Furbob. (Did the same modules! Yay! Except switched from networks to number patterns.)

Business maths is doable, to be honest. I don't think it's harder than most other modules.