Pre-CalculusOnline Pre-Calculus Tutoring,
Online Pre-Calculus Tutoring,
One Student at a Time
Pre-calculus pulls together everything calculus will assume you already know. Deb White spent forty years teaching it at California community colleges, and she makes the jump in abstraction feel like a series of small, manageable steps.
Free 15-min intro call No lock-in contracts 100% online, one-on-one
Pre-calculus is the bridge. Deb has walked it for forty years.
Pre-calculus isn’t one new topic — it’s several familiar ideas (functions, graphing, exponents) returning at a higher level of abstraction, plus a couple of genuinely new ones (trig identities, sequences) layered on top. Students who did fine in Algebra II often hit this course and feel like the ground shifted under them. It didn’t — the expectations just grew up.
Across forty years teaching at California community colleges, Deb has taught this exact bridge to calculus more times than she can count. She connects every new idea here back to the algebra you already trust, and uses a shared whiteboard so every graph and identity is built together, in real time.
40 years teaching college mathFunctions to trig to sequencesM.A. Statistics, StanfordShared whiteboard, drawn live
Who Deb helps with pre-calculus
- High school students taking Pre-Calculus before AP Calculus or college calculus.
- Students who did well in Algebra II but find the jump in abstraction here disorienting.
- College students taking a pre-calculus or college algebra/trig course as a calculus prerequisite.
- Adult learners returning to math who need this bridge course solid before going further.
Topics Deb covers
A full pre-calculus course, start to finish — tap any topic for a plain-English explainer.
Functions & graphs
Domain, range, transformations — reading a function’s whole behavior at a glance.
Polynomial & rational functions
End behavior, zeros, and asymptotes — what the graph does and why.
Exponential & logarithmic functions
Growth, decay, and the inverse relationship that ties them together.
Trigonometric functions & identities
The unit circle, graphs of sine and cosine, and the identities worth memorizing.
Sequences & series
Arithmetic and geometric patterns, and what it means to sum infinitely many terms.
Conics & vectors
Parabolas, ellipses, and hyperbolas as one family — plus the basics of vectors.
In Deb’s words
Every new idea here is an old idea, dressed up.
Students arrive at pre-calculus expecting a wall of brand-new material, and that expectation makes the course feel harder than it is. Almost everything here is something you already know, asked about more generally — a function instead of one equation, a repeating pattern instead of one term, an angle that can be any size instead of just the ones that fit in a triangle.
Math is not a spectator sport. I’ll show you a worked example, then hand you a similar one and stay right beside you while you work through it — getting stuck, finding the next step, fixing it — until it’s yours. And I start by finding the gap, because in pre-calculus the thing blocking you is usually one earlier idea that never quite solidified, not the whole subject.
Getting started is simple.
- 1
Book a free 15-minute intro call.
Tell Deb what class you're in and where pre-calculus went sideways.
- 2
Get a plan.
She'll pinpoint the gap and map out where to start.
- 3
Start your sessions.
Meet online, one-on-one, on your schedule. Book and pay right here. No contracts.
Common questions
- What exactly is pre-calculus, and do I really need it before calculus?
- Pre-calculus pulls together everything calculus assumes you already have cold: function notation, graph behavior, trig identities, and exponential/log relationships. Skipping it usually means relearning all of that in the middle of calculus, under more pressure. It's worth getting solid first.
- Do you cover trigonometry as part of pre-calculus?
- Yes — the unit circle, graphing sine and cosine, and the core identities are covered as part of this course, the same way most pre-calculus classes teach it.
- My child is fine with algebra but pre-calculus feels like a different subject. Why?
- Pre-calculus asks you to think about functions as objects you can transform, combine, and analyze — not just equations to solve. That's a real shift in abstraction, and it's exactly the kind of shift Deb spends a lot of time helping students make, step by step.
- Do you help with pre-calculus homework, or just concepts?
- Both. Deb works through your actual assignments while building the understanding underneath them, so the next problem gets easier too, not just this one.
- Who do you tutor — what ages?
- All ages. Pre-calculus students are usually juniors and seniors in high school or college students, but adult learners returning to math are very welcome too.
- What does it cost?
- Pricing is listed plainly on the pricing page, and the first 15-minute intro call is free — no commitment.
Let’s get pre-calculus making sense.
Book a free 15-minute intro call — no commitment, no pressure.