Don’t buy textbooks; you can’t afford them. Some are available online (legally or illegally); most others cover topics that you can learn about for free. You can probably get questions answered for free online- either at the various forums devoted to the subject, by emailing a relevant professor, or by asking somebody here (via pm or more personally).
If your high school has a math club, join it. If not, grinding math contest problems can still be useful. Try starting out by running through the AMC 12 problems on AOPS, which have solutions; note that doing well in math contests can be listed as an extracurricular and is a visible sign of awesomeness for colleges. (You probably shouldn’t expect to do over half.) IF you want more, I have access to a pdf database of ~6000-ish problems.
Taking Calc BC may not be helpful for learning math. AOPS has a good and relevant article here. Essentially, what you’re saying (I think?) is that you need a better understanding of more basic math (algebra+geometry)- calculus won’t be very helpful for that. Instead, as above, try learning to solve more advanced/difficult applications using the math you already know. Math contest problems are an easy source of these; I would also suggest self-learning math proof techniques in much greater depth than in the standard curriculum (induction, contradiction, proving the contrapositive, etc.)
You probably understand something when you a) can write down the proof, with very few missteps, whenever you want, and b) can envision a geometric analogy for the thing in question in your mind.
Incidentally, there’s a facebook group for LW Highschools. (It’s half college freshmen by now, but still...) Also, I think somebody had been running a meetup via skype (???)
Don’t buy textbooks; you can’t afford them. Some are available online (legally or illegally); most others cover topics that you can learn about for free. You can probably get questions answered for free online- either at the various forums devoted to the subject, by emailing a relevant professor, or by asking somebody here (via pm or more personally).
If your high school has a math club, join it. If not, grinding math contest problems can still be useful. Try starting out by running through the AMC 12 problems on AOPS, which have solutions; note that doing well in math contests can be listed as an extracurricular and is a visible sign of awesomeness for colleges. (You probably shouldn’t expect to do over half.) IF you want more, I have access to a pdf database of ~6000-ish problems.
Taking Calc BC may not be helpful for learning math. AOPS has a good and relevant article here. Essentially, what you’re saying (I think?) is that you need a better understanding of more basic math (algebra+geometry)- calculus won’t be very helpful for that. Instead, as above, try learning to solve more advanced/difficult applications using the math you already know. Math contest problems are an easy source of these; I would also suggest self-learning math proof techniques in much greater depth than in the standard curriculum (induction, contradiction, proving the contrapositive, etc.)
You probably understand something when you a) can write down the proof, with very few missteps, whenever you want, and b) can envision a geometric analogy for the thing in question in your mind.
Incidentally, there’s a facebook group for LW Highschools. (It’s half college freshmen by now, but still...) Also, I think somebody had been running a meetup via skype (???)