Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Reviving this as a cautionary tale. My child is taking Precalculus and AP Statistics at the same time, AP statistics is by far harder, and it’s mostly because it lacks the calculus foundation to really understand the material. The teacher is supposedly good being an AP Statistics grader for many years. This is the first time I’ve seen teaching to the test in earnest. The entire class is taught through examples one might encounter in the AP Statistics exam, and there’s zero explanation on why things work the way they do, no background, no derivations, just a stream of formulas to apply. I also suspect the teacher herself doesn’t really understand the material well, graphs shown without labels on x and y, but somehow it should be obvious the probability is the area under the curve. The mathematical language is atrocious, she uses “density curve” instead of probability density (distribution) function etc. never seen a formal definition of what the cumulative distribution function is etc.
My son is doing well in Precalculus, but struggling a lot in AP Statistics. I would definitely recommend taking it after Calculus. By now it’s quite clear he won’t do well on the AP exam.
It sounds like your son has a bad teacher, which can happen in any class. If he had a good teacher, you might be coming here to recommend the path to OP. I'm sorry he is having a tough time with a mediocre teacher. Is he meeting with a tutor to catch up?
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