Advanced Algebra - Honors & PreCalculus

Advanced Algebra - Honors:  Advanced Algebra: Concepts & Connections is the culminating course in a sequence of three high school courses designed to ensure career and college readiness. It is designed to prepare students for fourth course options relevant to their career pursuits. This course enhances students’ geometric, algebraic, graphical, and probabilistic reasoning skills. Students will apply their algebraic and geometric reasoning skills to make sense of problems involving geometry, trigonometry, algebra, probability, and statistics. Students will continue to enhance their analytical geometry and reasoning skills when analyzing and applying a deep understanding of polynomial expressions, proofs, constructions, rigid motions and transformations, similarity, congruence, circles, right triangle trigonometry, geometric measurement, and conditional probability. The identified Prerequisite for this course is Geometry: Concepts & Connections.

Pre-Calculus: Precalculus is a fourth-year mathematics course option for students who have completed Advanced Algebra: Concepts and Connections (or the equivalent). The course is intended to provide students with opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of Algebraic concepts that are critical to the study of Calculus. Students will also deepen their understanding of trigonometry and its applications. Throughout the Precalculus course there should be a focus on notational fluency and the use of multiple representations. The course includes the study and analysis of piecewise and rational functions; limits and continuity as related to piecewise and rational functions; sequences and series with the incorporation of convergence and divergence; conic sections as implicitly defined curves; the six trigonometric functions and their inverses; applications of trigonometry such as modeling periodic phenomena, modeling with vectors and parametric equations, solving oblique triangles in contextual situations, graphing in the Polar Plane; solutions of trigonometric equations in a variety of contexts; and the manipulation and application of trigonometric identities. Topics should be analyzed in multiple ways, including verbal and written, numerical, algebraic, and graphical presentations. Instruction and assessment should include the appropriate use of technology. Concepts should be introduced and investigated, where appropriate, in the context of realistic phenomena.