MATH-1300-HBL2

Welcome to the permanent home page for Section HBL2 of MATH-1300 (Precalculus) at Southeast Community College in the Spring semester of 2026. I am Toby Bartels, your instructor.

Course administration

Contact information

Feel free to send a message at any time, even nights and weekends (although I'll be slower to respond then).

Readings

The official textbook for the course is the 12th Edition of Precalculus written by Sullivan and published by Prentice-Hall (Pearson). You automatically get an online version of this textbook through Canvas, although you can use a print version instead if you like. This comes with access to Pearson MyLab, integrated into Canvas, on which many of the assignments appear.

Try to read this introduction before the first day of class:

Graphs and functions

  1. General review: A review of algebra that you should already know.
  2. Graphing review: Geometry in the coordinate plane.
  3. Graphing lines: Lines in the coordinate plane.
  4. Systems of equations: Systems of two or three linear equations in the same number of variables.
  5. Systems of inequalities: Systems of two linear inequalities in two variables.
  6. Functions: The heart of the course.
  7. Graphs of functions: Functions can be thought of geometrically, as particular sorts of graphs in the coordinate plane.
Quiz 1, covering the material in Problem Sets 1–7, is available on January 30 Friday and due on February 2 Monday.

Some of the dates below are wrong!

Properties and types of functions

  1. Properties of functions: Thinking of a function as a thing in its own right, it can have various properties and characteristics.
  2. Word problems with functions: Using functions to solve systems of equations with too many variables.
  3. Linear functions: A particularly simple kind of function with a consistent rate of change.
  4. Examples of functions: Examples of simple and complicated functions.
  5. Composite functions: Taking the output of one function and using it as the input to another.
  6. Inverse functions: Can we run a function backwards?
  7. Linear coordinate transformations: We can easily graph composites with linear functions.
Quiz 2, covering the material in Problem Sets 8–14, is available on February 13 Friday and due on February 16 Monday.

Polynomial and rational functions

  1. Quadratic functions: One step more complicated than linear functions, we can still graph these precisely.
  2. Applications of quadratic functions: Word problems with quadratic functions, especially finding extreme values, including an application to economics.
  3. Polynomial functions:
  4. Advanced factoring:
  5. Imaginary roots:
  6. Rational functions:
  7. Inequalities:
Quiz 3, covering the material in Problem Sets 15–22, is available on February 27 Friday and due on March 2 Monday.

Exponential and logarithmic functions

  1. Exponential functions:
  2. Logarithmic functions:
  3. Properties of logarithms:
  4. Logarithmic equations:
  5. Compound interest:
  6. Applications of logarithms:
Quiz 4, covering the material in Problem Sets 23–28, is available on March 6 Friday and due on March 9 Monday, and again available on March 13 Friday and due on March 16 Monday. (You may take it during either period.)

Trigonometric operations

  1. Circles:
  2. Angles:
  3. Length and area with radians:
  4. The trigonometric operations:
  5. Right triangles:
  6. Special angles:
Quiz 5, covering the material in Problem Sets 29–34, is available on March 27 Friday and due on March 30 Monday.

Trigonometric functions

  1. The trigonometric functions:
  2. Basic sinusoidal graphs:
  3. More basic graphs:
  4. Transformations of trigonometric functions:
  5. Sinusoidal functions:
  6. Inverse trigonometric operations:
  7. More inverse trigonometric operations:
  8. Sum-angle formulas:
Quiz 6, covering the material in Problem Sets 35–42, is available on April 10 Friday due on April 13 Monday.

Analytic trigonometry

  1. Sum-product formulas:
  2. Half-angle formulas:
  3. Simplifying trigonometric expressions:
  4. Trigonometric equations:
  5. Tricky trigonometric equations:
  6. Polar coordinates:
  7. Graphing in polar coordinates:
Quiz 7, covering the material in Problem Sets 43–49, is available on April 24 Friday and due on April 27 Monday.

Applications of trigonometry

  1. Solving right triangles:
  2. The Law of Sines:
  3. The Law of Cosines:
  4. Area of triangles:
  5. Applications of solving triangles:
  6. Harmonic motion:
  7. Vectors:
  8. Vectors and angles:
Quiz 8, covering the material in Problem Sets 50–57, is available on May 1 Friday and due on May 4 Monday.

Quizzes

  1. Graphs and functions:
  2. Properties and types of functions:
  3. Polynomial and rational functions:
  4. Exponential and logarithmic functions:
  5. Trigonometric operations:
  6. Trigonometric functions:
  7. Analytic trigonometry:
  8. Applications of trigonometry:

Final exam

There is a comprehensive final exam on May 5 Tuesday, in our normal classroom at the normal time but lasting until 11:10. (You can also arrange to take it at a different time May 4–8.) To speed up grading at the end of the semester, the exam is multiple choice and filling in blanks, with no partial credit.

For the exam, you may use one sheet of notes that you wrote yourself, but you may not use your book or anything else not written by you. You certainly should not talk to other people! Calculators are allowed (although you shouldn't really need one), but not communication devices (like cell phones).

The exam consists of questions similar in style and content to those in the practice exam (DjVu).


This web page and the files linked from it (except for the official SCC documents) were written by Toby Bartels, last edited on 2026 February 1. Toby reserves no legal rights to them.

The permanent URI of this web page is https://tobybartels.name/MATH-1300/2026SP/.

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