Modern States

Over Christ­mas break I stud­ied pre cal­cu­lus. While I taught pre cal­cu­lus last year and con­tin­ue to help stu­dents in this course, there is always more to learn. I decid­ed to study pre cal­cu­lus for two main rea­sons:  I am a stu­dent and I am a teacher. 

First, I am a stu­dent. I want to review cal­cu­lus. Since I don’t teach cal­cu­lus to high school stu­dents, I don’t have the ben­e­fit of review­ing, mas­ter­ing, and explor­ing the con­cepts in cal­cu­lus each year. I was struck by the fact that I had­n’t reviewed cal­cu­lus in years. How best do you pre­pare your­self to explore the world of cal­cu­lus oth­er than solid­i­fy­ing your alge­bra skills? 

Sec­ond, I am a teacher. I love con­nect­ing with my stu­dents in math­e­mat­ics by being able to under­stand how hard some of these con­cepts are for them. If I am nev­er chal­lenged by math, how will I ever help them get through their chal­lenges? Along these lines, I have stu­dents who are work­ing through alge­bra and pre cal­cu­lus in order to CLEP out of these class­es. In order to help them be pre­pared to pass the CLEP test, I went under cov­er as a stu­dent at Mod­ern States.

Mod­ern States is a non prof­it col­lec­tion of class­es designed to help stu­dents review mate­r­i­al in select high school class­es before tak­ing the CLEP test for the giv­en sub­ject. Each Mod­ern States class is designed and taught with the CLEP test as the pri­ma­ry goal. Stu­dents who com­plete a Mod­ern States class receive a code for reg­is­ter­ing for the CLEP exam at a local test­ing cen­ter. It’s all very orga­nized and thought out. If you have a stu­dent who has tak­en alge­bra 1, 2, and geom­e­try; Review­ing the mate­r­i­al with the Mod­ern States Col­lege Alge­bra class and tak­ing the test will ensure they won’t have to pay to retake these class­es in college. 

Here are my thoughts on the Mod­ern States class­es. I very much appre­ci­ate the stream­lined expe­ri­ence that they have cre­at­ed for review­ing a course’s mate­r­i­al. It seems thor­ough as a review course and avail­able to most every­one. I do have a cou­ple of caveats for you, as par­ents. The Mod­ern States class­es are writ­ten as a review of mate­r­i­al that stu­dents have already stud­ied. That was very clear. If you haven’t tak­en pre cal­cu­lus, then don’t think that you can learn all of pre cal­cu­lus in 6 sim­ple mod­ules from Mod­ern States. The mul­ti­ple choice ques­tions at the end of the class are exact repli­cas of the ques­tions asked ear­li­er in the class, which is a bit deceiv­ing. Instead of hav­ing 180 prac­tice ques­tions in pre­cal­cu­lus, there were 90 ques­tions each pre­sent­ed twice. Since I was­n’t tak­ing this class to pre­pare for the CLEP, it did­n’t both­er me. How­ev­er, I did com­plete all 90 ques­tions twice so that the sys­tem would show that I had fin­ished the entire course, this is clear­ly me being weird. 

In short, if you are prepar­ing your child for col­lege and want to knock some of those col­lege cred­its out before grad­u­a­tion, Mod­ern States is a great way to review mate­r­i­al that your child has already cov­ered. If your chil­dren are not ready for CLEP tests, don’t assume that you can’t still use them as a resource. As both stu­dents and teach­ers, we should all try to take time to do for our own edu­ca­tion what we ask our chil­dren to do for theirs.