Certified Tutors From Dominican University

I wanted to make sure the student is caught up in class, so we practiced several challenging problems covering limits, discontinuity, and derivatives. She is now caught up and we will be covering related rates next.

I printed out and brought a practice test for the student to do in preparation for his test that is coming up soon. The student has made drastic improvements on his test-taking and I am confident that he will pass his test.

Today's session was about logarithms. I built up to logs from the very beginning, by talking about all of algebra as addition and multiplication, and then logs and exponents as answering questions about how many multiplications happen. Then we worked through all the usual stuff: graphs of log functions, laws of logs, translating exponential equations to log and vice versa, solving exponential and log equations, and change of base. The student had a lot of great questions about edge cases of logs.

Today was my first session with this student. We talked a lot about what she felt she struggled with and what she felt she handled well. From the very beginning, it was clear that she was bright and willing to challenge herself. We primarily focused on study skills and writing skills regarding her upcoming test on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. She's incredibly self-motivated, as evidenced by her color coding of the novel and her work on her short-answer packet. She clearly understands the material, even if some of the concepts are foreign to her. The primary struggle for the student is that there seems to be a barrier between her formulating her thoughts and getting them coherently onto the page. When she talked directly to me about the material, her answers were complex and made a lot of sense. On paper, however, she struggled to articulate the same statements. We worked to have her rewrite her own work and say her sentences aloud as she wrote them and it seemed to have a positive effect! We also addressed some basic sentence structure and grammar in order to give her a background for why some of her writing may need work. I'm going to put together a grammar packet for her and email it for practice over the next week. She has great potential as a writer because she thinks deeply about subjects; she just needs help in building the tools to express herself.

Yesterday's session was excellent. The student was able to understand the definition of a function, which was one of the new ideas that he has been having the most trouble with. We spent about half the time working on relations, charts, and graphs, and how to decide if they are functions or not. He was able to really understand it, which is great considering that it's a very abstract idea that lots of students struggle with. We spent the rest of the time talking about linear equations and how to graph them. He is getting pretty good at plotting coordinate points, and he got a pretty good start at graphing linear equations. All of this material was a little bit overwhelming to him when they started covering it in class a few weeks ago, but now he is starting to catch up.

The student is currently taking Algebra 2 and physics. We went over solving equations that involved multiple roots of x and configured the equation to solve for x. We covered domains of functions and how to embed functions. The physics portion covered basic manipulation of work and energy. We went over a bit more advanced physics to solidify ideas.