Letter to Calculus Class

Welcome. Here you are. Ready to embark on another year of math? No? Well to bad. You should have thought of that before you decided to take AP calculus. What? You decided to take it last year, when the warm weather had clouded your judgment? You didn’t anticipate how crippling senioritis would be? Well you’re going to have to deal with it. Having a summer assignment is just the beginning of your calculus experience. Calculus can be a fun class, or your worst nightmare come to life to eat you while you dream after falling asleep in class. It is what you make of it (It is a lot easier for calculus to be a fun class if you enjoy doing math. If you don’t enjoy doing math and you still enjoy the class, then I salute you from a safe distance of 1,000 kilometers, because you are crazy.). Personally I enjoyed and was good at calculus, so I had no problem. It was a welcome refresher to the monotony, and boredom of pre-cal. The material is more engaging, and is overall more interesting than pre-cal. So you have that to look forward to. Or to dread, depending on your perspective. If you enjoy a challenge, this class will either be just up your ally, or merely wet your appetite. If you don’t enjoy a challenge, then you probably have a low definition of challenge, and this class will plague you. As far as the AP exam goes, there are two options you have before you: Study, or know calculus. If you don’t know all of calculus, then you will probably have to study, unless you are godlike at guessing, which I know is not true, or else you would have won the lottery and wouldn’t be here. How you perform in class should be a good way to gauge how well your attempts at knowing calculus are coming, but its never a bad idea to do a little extra studying once and a while. Unless you are failing, then a little studying isn’t going to help, it’s going to take a lot.