Certified Tutors From Centenary College of Louisiana

This week the student and I worked to prepare him for his semester exams, which start next Tuesday. We focused first on chemistry and math on Thursday before spending our session today on math and essay writing (for both his history and language arts finals.) The student received another excellent score on his recent math test (98%) which is a solid indicator that he's prepared for his PreCalc test. He also received an improved grade on a chemistry test which he retook. Overall, I'm very confident in his preparation for math and history, while more work needs to be done in chemistry and language arts. He is working on his language arts final with his book talk partner this afternoon, so I'll have more guidance on how to help him prepare for that exam during our next session tomorrow. I'd like to take a moment to also acknowledge how impressed I am with Simon's work ethic and character. Over the past few months I've watched him put in the necessary effort to improve his grades, and it's paying off for him. He showed great discipline today by staying focused for a longer session, and I continue to be impressed by his work ethic during our sessions. We have one more hurtle to prepare for with his exams next week, and I believe he's going to do very well after continued preparation tomorrow and Tuesday. Good work!

I continued to work with the student on factoring, use of the quadratic formula, and introduced completing the square to solve quadratic equations.

We completed corrections from a practice AP style test. The student did very well on the test. We were able to work through the problems she had trouble with, and she understood most of them very well. She has another packet to complete for class, which we will work on tomorrow.

The student and I worked on her test corrections today in science. We started by going over what she missed and what concepts she felt uncomfortable with. I noticed that most questions she missed in science were related to geography. I also had her write out the terms she did not know and I gave her the definition and real life examples of the questions so that she can review over it before her test in science. She also tends to get stuck if she doesn't know a term in the question instead of using context clues to figure out what the question is asking. I think that if she goes over every question that she missed on the test and reviews the definitions I gave her on her own, she will have no difficult passing the test satisfactorily. I recommend another timed practice test in science to measure her progress and get a realistic idea of how she will perform the real thing. I also provided multiple worksheets for her to do on her own in mathematics and I will check them next time we meet. We will focus on math and going over the problems that she missed during next week.

We started by the student working on his math homework, which was on converting between U.S. Customary and the metric system. He completed 1 page, then he took a 1 minute break by competing in an online division challenge. Then he completed another page that involved more conversions, line plots, number lines, and fraction to decimal conversions. He's really great at doing it all in his head. I had him work on two more problems that I found that involved number plots and finding the "fair share" (or average) of the number plot. He has a math test tomorrow that he said he feels confident on. Before leaving, I told him he has to do at least 3 more division competitions on his own.

The student will be taking his Chapter 8 exam on Monday, and today we continued reviewing material from that chapter. We have now gone over sections 8.1 through 8.5, which means we only have to cover 8.6 and 8.7 before his test. The chapter is about rational expressions, what the graphs look like, where they have asymptotes, and where there are no solutions or holes. He seems to understand the material. He had small gaps here and there, but we eliminated those by going through each section to find out what he didn't understand. Holes, for example, were difficult for him the first time around, but after talking about them for only a few minutes, he was able to see what they were and how to determine whether an expression contained a hole or not. I provided him with a simple list containing the things he has to memorize and how to apply the rules, and I also explained where the rules came from. I then had him explain to me in his own words the rule that I had just explained to him- which he was able to do.