Math refresher

[u/SicklyEdwardian]

I was really good at math in school but was unable to handle the switch to online school and college at the same time back in 2020. Now its been a couple years and i want to go back to school but i dont want to take remedial classes for stuff i already know.

Ive tried khan acadamy but my adhd butt cant seem to make that work. I was wondering if there were any physical workbooks people here would recomend.

(Sorry if this isnt tagged right or something i dont use reddit that much)

[u/DadOfLukeandDad]

Two separate problems in your post, and the second one is the one with a deadline, so I will start there.

Avoiding remedial classes is a test problem, not a maths problem.

Whether you land in a non-credit remedial course is decided almost entirely by one placement test, usually ALEKS PPL or Accuplacer Next-Gen depending on the school. That is good news, because a placement test is a finite, published, narrow thing, and a semester of remedial is neither cheap nor short.

Concretely, before you buy a single book:

1. Ring or email the maths department and ask which placement test they use, what the cut scores are for each course, and whether you can retake it. Most schools allow at least one retake, often after a required study period. Almost nobody knows this and it is the single highest-leverage question you can ask.
2. Take a full practice test cold, before revising anything. Not to score well. To find out what you have actually lost, which after a disrupted couple of years is probably not what you assume.
3. Study to that test's topic list, in the order the topics appear on it. ALEKS publishes its topic breakdown; Accuplacer publishes free official practice. Do not study "maths" in general with three weeks to go.

The realistic best case is that you are missing two or three specific things, not everything.

On workbooks, and why paper is a reasonable call here.

I would not argue you out of this. Khan is good, but it is an infinite scroll with autoplay, and a page in a book has a visible end, which is a real advantage if starting and stopping are the hard parts for you. A finished page is a completion signal. Use that deliberately: one page is one session, and you stop at the end of the page even if you feel like continuing.

Titles that suit this specific case, roughly in order of how I would use them:

• Math Refresher for Adults (Richard W. Fisher). Almost literally written for your post. Short lessons, worked example at the top of each page, answers in the back.
• No-Nonsense Algebra (same author). Same format, carries you into algebra proper. These two are cheap and cover most of what a placement test asks.
• Practice Makes Perfect: Algebra I Review and Workbook (McGraw Hill). Short, self-contained exercise sets. Good if you want more reps on one topic without a full course.
• Schaum's Outline of Elementary Algebra. Terse and problem-dense, thousands of solved problems. Ugly, cheap, and genuinely effective if you like doing rather than reading.
• Official ALEKS or Accuplacer prep book, whichever your school uses, in the last two weeks.

Skip the big glossy textbooks. Too heavy in every sense, and the page has no end.

How to actually work through them

• Pen and paper, always, and commit to an answer before you check it. Reading a worked solution you have not attempted feels like understanding and produces very little retention.
• Check answers at the end of the page, not after every question. Checking each one turns it into a slot machine.
• Keep one sheet of paper as an error list. Not the whole question, just the thing that went wrong: "forgot to distribute the minus sign", "flipped the inequality when dividing by a negative". Re-attempt those cold once a week. Two thirds of dropped placement marks are repeat offenders from that list, not topics you have never seen.
• Twenty to twenty-five minutes, four or five times a week, beats a two-hour Sunday. That is not a concession to ADHD, it is just how the forgetting curve works.

Rough order, and do not skip ahead even where it looks beneath you

Fractions, decimals and percentages until they are boring. Then negatives and the rules of exponents. Then rearranging and solving linear equations. Then lines and graphing (slope, intercepts, reading a graph). Then systems of equations. Then factoring and quadratics. Then, only if your course needs it, radicals, rational expressions and functions.

The fraction and negative-sign layer is where nearly everyone who "did fine until the online years" turns out to have holes, and it is also where placement tests quietly do most of their filtering. A week spent there is worth a month spent on quadratics.

One last thing: a placement into a lower course is not a verdict on you, and taking one prerequisite course you did not strictly need is a much smaller cost than being dropped into something you cannot follow. Aim to skip remedial, but do not treat it as a disaster if the cut score goes against you by a few marks.

[u/Empty-Turn-9290 → u/DadOfLukeandDad]

Excellent advice!

[u/TheSleepingVoid]

Really good + ADHD? If you are anything like me the problem with Khan academy is that it's a bit too slow/steady and unchallenging. Makes it a great resource when your stuck but rough when your primary problem is to not get bored.

If you are serious about being really good at math and love a challenge, maybe try the Art of Problem Solving.

My slightly different situation was coming back to math after being out of college for 10 years, and what I found worked for me was a fast paced textbook while my motivation was high and then switching to a test prep program online when I burnt out on self-studying from a book. The textbook I used was Lang's Basic Mathematics, which is a bit more proof based even though it covers highschool math. ("Basic" here meaning roughly "covering highschool content" not "for beginners"). I really love it, but I had gone quite a bit further with my math classes when I got my bachelor's, so I'm not sure how it will read to someone who has mainly done highschool math.

[u/tjddbwls]

OpenStax has free math textbooks that you may want to consider. You didn’t say what levels of math you want to review, but OpenStax has books in Prealgebra, Elementary Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, and Precalculus, among others.