Why Pre-Learn Your College Math Classes?

If you pre-learn the material beforehand, you're immune to even the worst teaching, and you can simultaneously kick off a virtuous cycle.

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The thing about college math classes is they’re high stakes and it’s a roll of the dice what level of instructional quality you’re going to get.

Will the instructor have an accent you struggle to understand? Will they face the blackboard the entire time and march forward no matter how lost the students are? Will the homework problems be so hard as to be unapproachable? Will solutions to homework problems be released? Will the homework even be graded? Will you get blindsided by tests covering things that weren’t emphasized on the homework? Will the instructor assume you learned a bunch of prerequisite knowledge in high school, that you were never actually made to learn? Do they even know what’s covered in a typical high school curriculum? Does the instructor understand that they likely have outsized mathematical aptitude compared to their students, and their students will not be able to “fill in the gaps” as well as they did themself when learning the material?

There’s a hundred different things that can go wrong, and most classes suffer in at least a handful of those aspects – especially at college, where instructors face little accountability and incentives to provide high-quality learning experiences. Once in a while you might get an instructor who loves teaching, does a great job at it, and goes above and beyond for their students, but if you’re depending on that kind of situation to play out with every math class you take, you’re going to have to have a rough time and probably come out with rough grades.

On the other hand, if you pre-learn the material beforehand, you’re immune to even the worst teaching, and you can breeze through your classes. Plus, if you blow a course out of the water while also interacting with the professor, that can open all kinds of doors to recommendations for internships, research projects with professors, or having them connect you to jobs, internships, and other opportunities with people in their network. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing super well because you’re learning in real-time or because you pre-learned the material. Even if you aren’t a genius, you appear to be one in everyone else’s eyes, and consequently you get a ticket to those opportunities reserved for top students. You can kick off a virtuous cycle this way.

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