Precalculus Syllabus

This course builds upon the skills and concepts gained over previous courses in Algebra and Geometry.  Since our curriculum is spiral in design, the scope and pace for presenting various content strands will focus more on extending comprehension in the context of function analysis rather than treating them as new material.  With less time spent on review, this allows more time for higher order reasoning skills needed for future studies.  This course fulfills the BLS graduation requirement and adequately prepares students for a senior elective.  At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to: write equivalent forms of equations, inequalities, and systems of equations and solve them with fluency- mentally or with paper/pencil in simple cases and using technology in all cases;  use a variety of symbolic representations, including recursive and parametric equations, for functions and relations; judge the meaning, utility, and reasonableness of the results of symbolic manipulations, including those carried out by technology; understand relations and functions and select, convert flexibly among, and use various representations for them; analyze functions of one variable by investigating rates of change, intercepts, zeros, asymptotes, and local and global behavior; understand and perform transformations such as arithmetically combining, composing, and inverting commonly used functions, using technology to perform such operations on more complicated symbolic expressions; understand and compare the properties of classes of functions, including exponential, polynomial, rational, logarithmic, and trigonometric functions; use various representations to help understand the effects of simple transformations and their compositions; interpret representations of functions of two variables; identify essential quantitative relationships in a situation and determine the class ore classes of functions that might model the relationships; approximate and interpret rates of change from graphical and numerical data.

This course builds upon the skills and concepts gained over previous courses in Algebra and Geometry.  Since our curriculum is spiral in design, the scope and pace for presenting various content strands will focus more on extending comprehension in the context of function analysis rather than treating them as new material.  With less time spent on review, this allows more time for higher order reasoning skills needed for future studies.  This course fulfills the BLS graduation requirement and adequately prepares students for a senior elective.  At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to: write equivalent forms of equations, inequalities, and systems of equations and solve them with fluency- mentally or with paper/pencil in simple cases and using technology in all cases;  use a variety of symbolic representations, including recursive and parametric equations, for functions and relations; judge the meaning, utility, and reasonableness of the results of symbolic manipulations, including those carried out by technology; understand relations and functions and select, convert flexibly among, and use various representations for them; analyze functions of one variable by investigating rates of change, intercepts, zeros, asymptotes, and local and global behavior; understand and perform transformations such as arithmetically combining, composing, and inverting commonly used functions, using technology to perform such operations on more complicated symbolic expressions; understand and compare the properties of classes of functions, including exponential, polynomial, rational, logarithmic, and trigonometric functions; use various representations to help understand the effects of simple transformations and their compositions; interpret representations of functions of two variables; identify essential quantitative relationships in a situation and determine the class ore classes of functions that might model the relationships; approximate and interpret rates of change from graphical and numerical data.

=== Textbook ===

=== Textbook ===

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