How long does a Thinkwell course take...

[SallyMac]

I am looking at Thinkwell for Trig and/or Physics for my ds to start soon. I am hoping someone out there has had experience with these courses as I have more questions than answers.

1) Are these complete 1 credit 1 year high school courses?

2) How long did it take your dc to complete them?

3) Are they rigorous and what did you and dc think of them once completed.

[Sharon in MD]

Thinkwell has another course College Algebra that is a part of the precalc course. Last year I purchased Thinkwells College Algebra and then, this past summer, was looking, in detail, at the trig and precalc courses. The trig course is just that, Trig, it is, IMHO about a six month trig class. The precalc course is the entire contents of the Trig course plus a bunch of the lectures from the College Algebra course. There are NO new materials added. So, if I were buying one of these courses, trig or pre-calc, I'd buy the precalc. (ANd I'd go to the homeschool coop to get it because they have some sort of special sale deal going right now with Thinkwell).

We have only really used Thinkwell's College Algebra. We have used the trig course and the physics course as supplements. The biggest problem that we found with the College Algebra course was that the problem sets were too repetitive. The word problems or application type problems were all grouped in one section of a chapter rather than dispersed throughout. I also was frustrated with errors in the answers. To give Thinkwell credit, they responded promptly to the problems that we found. But, that meant taking the time to email them about a problem and waiting to hear back about the resolution. There were also a few times that we had problems with testing with answers that ds provided that were correct, but not entered keystroke for keystroke correctly. This can be a real problem with some of the free answer problems. You must key in the answer exactly in required format or it will be counted as wrong. Again, they were more than happy to grant the appropriate credit, but it still was somewhat of a hassle to have to go through the process.

I personally don't think that Thinkwell is as rigorous or thorough of a course as Foerster, which is my only comparison point. I do think that they can be a very helpful supplement or teacher's aide. I would not purchase a complete Thinkwell course in math again. I would buy a hotmath subscription instead so that i could watch the vids. OR if I wanted longer access to the material than the 1 year that you get from hotmath, I would buy the cd-roms from an ebay vendor and just not bother to subcribe to the course. Then I could just watch my cd-roms whenever I wanted to. At least I think that will work too.

[SallyMac]

Not being a "math person," I need all the help I can get with supplements. On the other hand, even though I took math in college, I am not good enough with math to be able to catch any errors that might be in Thinkwell's curriculum:confused:. While DS is much better in math than I am, he still needs either a fabulous curriculum that really explains concepts well OR he needs a really good teacher. My fear is that he'll have neither at the high school. A friend whose dc are graduated from this school told me this school is NOT good in math and science and as her youngest is going to major in engineering she took him out and put him in an all boys college prep parochial school. My ds doesn't know what he wants to major in (trying out different courses at the CC), but it may be in a technical area so we want to make sure he has enough math and science.

[Sharon in MD]

Go to http://www.hotmath.com and look around.

It sounds to me like that may meet your needs if what you are looking for is supplementation to a school's curriculum. Did I understand correctly that your son will be in school and your concern is the quality of their program?

Hot math has subscriptions to Thinkwells videos for about 25 bucks per year. Now, with that you do NOT get the thinkwell exercises and tests as you would if you purchased the Thinkwell product with the subscription, but you do get Ed Burger's videos. And hotmath has problems on their website for students to work as well. They also have homework help for certain texts....you could look and see if they support the program he would be using.

Another good online math place is sponsored by Drexel University. It is called Ask Dr. Math http://mathforum.org/dr.math/ I've used it a bunch of times when I get stuck.

Somone else posted this place too, but I haven't looked at them very much yet. http://www.algebra.com/

Maybe some of these could be of help to you.

I know what you mean about catching the Thinkwell errors....we only caught them because of ds being very sure that HE was right and THEY were wrong. At first I thought he was being very cocky....then I realized he might actually be correct....

Anyway, if supplemental support is what you are looking for, I'd save my money and use something like hotmath.

HTH