My school had honors geometry and regular geometry. I think the expectation was the students from honors geometry would never take trigonometry... I know I never did.
Huh. I'd have expected it to be the other way around. Why wouldn't an honors student keep progressing in the subject?
When I took Honors Geometry, it was the only Geometry class offered by my school. But that was a quirk of the way the school system was organized at the time. We had grades 10-12 in high school and 7-9 in junior high. If you were an honors math student, you'd have been ready for Geometry in 9th grade. If not, you'd have gotten it in high school. The honors track was laid out like this:
7th - Pre-Algebra
8th - Algebra I
9th - Geometry
10th - Algebra II
11th - Trig/Pre-Calculus
12th - Calculus
If you weren't an honors math student, there was another class they'd offer you in 7th, and you'd take Pre-Algebra in 8th. If I recall correctly, you'd then get Algebra I, Geometry, and either Algebra II or something called Business Math, your choice, to satisfy your graduation requirements. You only needed 3 years of math in your last 4 years of school.
So in my school, the Honors Geometry students were pretty much expected to take Trig... and I did. That was as far as I went, though. You know this epidemic of the lazy teachers you can't get rid of because of tenure and unions that certain politicians keep bloviating about in the media? In my public school experience I only ever met one, in my senior year, and he was teaching Calculus and AP Physics. I dropped both courses.
