Award-Winning AP Physics 2 Tutors serving Vancouver

Today we covered genetics and heredity material that will be on an upcoming exam. The material covered subjects that the student first learned several months before, so we dove into each topic on the review sheet in depth so that he could have a thorough prep session for the exam. Some of the topics he needs to cover more independently are transcription, translation and mitosis. He had an understanding of each topic but needs a little more practice to do extremely well on the exam.

Today we worked on the student's ecology assignment. She has to research the ecology and the human impact on the ocean. We worked on making a food pyramid of the ocean with phytoplankton on the bottom of the pyramid and killer whales at the top of the pyramid. We also talked about how pollution and global warming have negatively impacted the ocean. She didn't struggle with any of the material.

Tonight the student and I began to edit her Lit Review paper on California grunion. She has finished everything except for the conclusion and needs to have that completed before our next session. I was able to read and help her fix mistakes through the first half of the paper. I'm planning on finishing this during our next session so she will be able to have it complete by the end of the week.

We covered bacteria and viruses. I looked over the study guide she made from the book. Also, we discussed some note-taking and studying strategies to try to improve test grades. She seemed to mostly be struggling with committing the information to memory and being able to use her knowledge base to answer questions. Next session we should go over some test-taking strategies.

We first discussed the student's result on the second exam and tried to figure out how he could have performed better. Next, we discussed the upcoming exam on DNA replication and transcription. We decided to save the practice exam for the following week and instead began work on Problem Set #8. We covered concepts related to polymerase chain reaction, primer and experimental design, DNA synthesis and replication, next-generation sequencing, cancer genomics, and mutation repair mechanisms. He indicated that he would look at base pair mutations and repair mechanisms in greater detail before moving on to the material on gene transcription. We agreed to meet after the weekend was through.

The student and I covered maxima and minima. This is technically a calculus concept but we broke it down into a physics interpretation. He did very well with this. We decided to shift our focus from class work to the physics SAT. We created a plan for how to approach the test and how to break down his study time for the topics. I left him with an assignment to finish the SAT questions in the kinematics section and review the summary pages.