As a fellow shape rotator enjoyer, I was suddenly reminded how hard PreCalculus seemed to be for female students at my high school. They could follow Calculus fine with its orderly rules of derivatives and algebraic qualities, but PreCalculus exasperated them. I think it literally is the rotational aspect of the unit circle and sinusoidal functions. It’s the one area of math where you have to rotate shapes or angles in novel ways (as opposed to finding a volume in calculus by rotating a line segment about an axis). I’d be interested in the gender breakdown of grades for PreCalculus and Calculus courses. Thanks, King, for bringing this topic up.
As a fellow shape rotator enjoyer, I was suddenly reminded how hard PreCalculus seemed to be for female students at my high school. They could follow Calculus fine with its orderly rules of derivatives and algebraic qualities, but PreCalculus exasperated them. I think it literally is the rotational aspect of the unit circle and sinusoidal functions. It’s the one area of math where you have to rotate shapes or angles in novel ways (as opposed to finding a volume in calculus by rotating a line segment about an axis). I’d be interested in the gender breakdown of grades for PreCalculus and Calculus courses. Thanks, King, for bringing this topic up.