Starting early?

[a weaponized ikea chair]

I am in year 10 and are thinking of getting the specialist 1/2 textbook and starting from chapter 1 up so I can get an idea. Would you recommend this?

[S_R_K]

You're going to do a lot of that content later on, so if you do it now, you'll just sit in class being bored.

At this stage, it's probably more useful to make sure your foundations in number, algebra, geometry, trigonometry are strong. Parts of the 1/2 textbook that are good for this are:

Chapters 1 and 5 on linear and quadratic equations.
The first half of Chapter 2, on arithmetic techniques with real and rational numbers.
Chapter 9 on geometry of triangles and quadrilaterals. Possibly Chapters 10 on circle geometry, if you did that in Year 10 as well.
Chapter 13 on trigonometry.

Apart from basic skills, make sure you practice working through non-routine problems and recognising when and how to apply techniques - there's far less cookie-cutter maths in Specialist compared to Methods. So try the extended response questions in the chapter reviews.

[Sine]

I am in year 10 and are thinking of getting the specialist 1/2 textbook and starting from chapter 1 up so I can get an idea. Would you recommend this?

Honestly, I don't see this being too useful if the sole reason you are doing the questions are for the vce exams. The content of spec 1/2 is pretty interesting so it is great to do it but not a lot of it will help directly in terms of study scores.

You could possibly just do a few chapters e.g .complex numbers, vectors and a bit of geometry from spec 1/2.

A more efficient way would be to do the 1/2 methods textbook (if you haven't done it already) and then do 3/4 methods then 3/4 spec textbooks.

I'm not exactly endorsing skipping 1/2 spec as a whole since any math practice will help you overall regardless of what you do the future. I would probably suggest students to learn those 1/2 spec but the most efficient pathway would be methods 1/2 -> methods 3/4 -> spec 3/4

[milanander]

Do this, but with the 3/4 textbook instead.

Unless you're some mensa genius, absolutely not. Especially at year 10 level.

Getting a strong foundation is way more important than blindly trying to get ahead.

[J_Rho]

I've not done spesh but, communicate to your teacher about how you can extend yourself in maths this year to help prepare you to do spesh next year and perhaps when you are doing 1/2 next year you can look over the 3/4 textbook. i.e when you are doing probability in 1/2 look over and perhaps try doing some 3/4 probability stuff.

[Lilyyyy]

not all the content in 1/2 textbook is relevant for 3/4. If you really want to get a head start and do well for spesh, consider learning methods 3/4 content first, it will provide a really strong foundation for 3/4 spesh