Perhaps the reason no such course existed at your high school is that your high school didnt offer calculus.Or if it did, maybe the course people took before calculus was just called something different, but still had the same content as precalculus classes today.......
i'm a senior and i always liked math. although i'm not the best at it, nor do i have any particular talent, i chose the class because it's more challenging. you get to learn so much more from taking AB. like how to calculate volume on a xy plane. you learn stuff that you can use in real life.
sure i didn't remember trig functions, but you don't need to know everything from Alg/Trig to do calc. They do a quick review for you before you do something new.
Pre-calculus is unecessary and was developed for students who should have been held back one grade but instead were just passed along. It's part of the dumbing down of America advocated primarily by liberal educators. The course did not even exist when I went through high school.
Usually, you'd either take Alg2/Trig or precalculus, with precalculus being better preparation for calculus (hence its name). At the school I went to, people who didn't plan on taking calculus took Alg2/Trig, and strong students who did plan on taking calculus took precalculus instead.
@ironduke, maybe you should learn how the curriculum works before bashing "liberal educators." Precalculus has nothing to do with dumbing people down. Quite the opposite, it's a more challenging version of algebra 2/trigonometry that is intended for the brightest math students, those who will go on to take calculus while still in high school. Perhaps the reason no such course existed at your high school is that your high school didn't offer calculus. Or if it did, maybe the course people took before calculus was just called something different, but still had the same content as precalculus classes today.
