Reply to AP physics as a freshman at Blair?

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[quote=Anonymous]Back in the dark ages, before my high school started an AP program, I took Physics concurrently with Algebra 2.  It was a disaster because that course relied heavily on Trig.  We spent months on mechanics/vectors.  Then we went into EM radiation and optics.  I remember going home and trying to look up "sign waves" in the World Book encyclopedia because I wasn't aware a sine function existed.  I would futilely try to punch the numbers of a problem into my calculator in various combinations, hoping that I would somehow stumble on a combination that would give me something approximating the correct answer (answers to the odd questions were at the back of the book).  Occasionally the teacher would have a brief digression to explain something to the students who were in Calculus, but thankfully, we weren't held responsible for those.

The teacher was a very kind man who had promised us that as long as we tried we would make it through the class.  He must have realized I was desperately trying, because I made it through with a B, but I would have gotten so much more out of the class if I had waited and taken it the following year when I had Trig.

The AP version probably has a different scope than my HS class did, but Mechanics was the foundation for the rest of my course.  How do you teach physics without Trig?  Do they teach the basic Trig functions as part of the Physics course?[/quote]

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