Trigonometry doesn't get easier, it just gets familiar
I first came across Tips For Trigonometry Weekly probably three years ago when a friend shared it in a math study group. It's a weekly digest that breaks down one trig concept at a time with worked examples, common mistakes, and practice problems. Nothing fancy. No gamification, no animated videos, just straightforward content delivered once a week. The format is deceptively simple. Each issue centers on a single topic -- right triangle trig, unit circle identities, law of sines applications, solving trig equations, inverse functions, maybe a proof or two. The author includes the core idea, a worked example that shows the thinking process rather than just the answer, a set of practice problems with varying difficulty, and a short section called "Where People Mess Up" that highlights the specific errors students actually make on homework and exams.
Getting Started With Tips For Trigonometry Weekly
To subscribe, you go to their landing page and enter your email. That's it. They send one issue per week, usually on Thursdays or Fridays. You can unsubscribe anytime, but most people don't because the content is reasonably consistent in quality. Here's the thing nobody tells you about using a weekly newsletter format for learning math: the spacing actually works in your favor. You get one concept per week, which gives you time to work through the problems, forget parts of it, then remember it again when the next issue drops. It's spaced repetition without the app. The key is to actually do the problems. Reading the worked example and nodding along is not the same as solving it yourself. I've seen people go through months of these issues without doing a single problem on paper, then wonder why nothing stuck. When I was working through this myself, I hit a wall around issue 14 -- harmonic motion and sum-to-product identities. The practice problems assumed I was comfortable converting between sum and product forms, and I wasn't. What I did instead was pause the subscription, go back to the earlier issues on product-to-sum and sum-to-product formulas, and rework every example from scratch before moving forward. The newsletter doesn't have a dashboard or progress tracker. You just get emails. So staying organized is entirely on you.
I started a simple spreadsheet tracking which issue covered what topic, my score on the practice problems, and which ones I got wrong. Two columns of data plus a short note each week took maybe five minutes. That habit alone made the difference between forgetting issue 8 by the time issue 12 arrived and actually retaining it.
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What makes this resource different from other trig materials
Most trig resources either try to be comprehensive textbooks or quick YouTube tutorials. This sits in a narrow middle ground. The problems are selected to match what shows up on actual college-level math courses -- calculus prep, engineering math, physics applications. They're not math or olympiad level. If you need that, look elsewhere. The "Where People Mess Up" sections are the most valuable part. They don't just say "watch your signs." They show you the exact moment a student derails. Like the time someone dropped the negative sign when evaluating sin(-pi/4) on the unit circle, or when they forgot to check for extraneous solutions after squaring both sides of a trig equation. These are the kind of mistakes that cost points on exams even when you know the underlying concept. There are tradeoffs. The weekly cadence means if you're cramming before a midterm two weeks from now, this isn't going to help you much. You'd be better off with a review sheet or a problem set organized by topic. The newsletter assumes you're working ahead, not catching up. Also, the problems don't always include full solutions. Some issues give answers to odd-numbered problems only. If you get stuck on an even-numbered one, there's no solution manual to fall back on.
I found the best workaround is to post the problem in the community thread if they have one, or work through it with a classmate. There's a comment section on the website where people discuss specific problems from each issue. It's not moderated by the author, so the quality varies, but it's better than nothing when you're stuck on problem 6 from issue 22.
A practical approach to getting the most out of it
Don't treat it like passive reading. Block out 45 minutes when the email lands. Read the concept section in 10 minutes. Work through the examples yourself before looking at the solutions. Then do the practice problems with the newsletter closed. Close is important -- if you keep it open while solving, you're checking answers, not building recall. Keep a mistake log. Not a general one, but specific to each issue. When you get a problem wrong, write down exactly what step you went wrong on and why. "I messed up the identity" is useless. "I applied the double angle formula to the wrong term because I didn't rewrite tan in terms of sin and cos first" is something you can act on next time. After four to six issues, revisit the earlier practice problems. The format doesn't force review, so you have to build it in yourself. Thirty minutes of reworking old problems once a month keeps everything from becoming background noise.
The subscription is free. The content won't turn you into a trig expert overnight. But if you actually engage with it consistently over a semester, it covers the material that typically trips people up in introductory and intermediate courses. The gaps it doesn't fill -- things like parametric trig applications or complex number connections -- are worth supplementing with a textbook or lecture series.
