Certified Tutors From Kent State University at Salem

We covered the animal kingdom and specifically looked at the different classes of worms, vertebrates, and sponges. The student had a great attitude in obtaining a way to organize and grasp the material. He got a 94 on his exam which was a big improvement from his last exam. :)

Today I taught pre-algebra to both students. The first student was on the unit of ratios and unit's relations. I gave her some problems of simplifying ratios and word problems regarding to these topics, just to make sure that she understood it. I tended to give questions that ranged from easy to slightly challenging. She managed to get all the easier problems done without my help (but occasionally with some minor mistakes). As I pointed out her mistakes, she corrected them immediately. She needed a little help on the slightly challenging problems. I walked her through it by letting her wrote down every step she needed to get to the answer (The challenging problems sometimes had something that she did not know, such as solving equations with variables on both sides, which slightly surprised me). At the end she got all the problems with occasional help. The second student was studying solving word problems that involved an unknown variable. She struggled on how to set up the problem at first. I walked her through one of the easier problems, just to give her an idea of how the quantities related to each other and how to set up the problem. Eventually, she could do all the easier ones without asking for my help. She still needed a lot of help on the harder ones. I always let her try it and indirectly hinted her, so as she wrote it down, she had some experience of solving similar problems. She sometimes made minor mistakes such as distributing errors, but corrected them as long as I pointed out to her. She solved all of her homework problems today (on some of them she needed my help, but on some of them she didn't). I always advised both of them to relax before picking up their pencils. I showed them the strategy: relax, then identify the knowns and unknowns and their relationships, then set up variable equations, then solve the equations, and finally check for what the questions are really asking for and look for minor errors (such as the time duration is being negative). Overall, I think they got better in solving word problems.

The student has a final exam coming up this week, and we spent today's session going over a general review of all the subjects she learned this semester. We worked on many practice problems from a review packet with subjects ranging from congruent triangles to finding areas of shaded figures. The student knows her geometry concepts well. To prepare for her exam, I encouraged her to trust her knowledge of math and emphasized practicing as many problems as possible.

Today, the student and I worked on rational expressions, solving rational equations, simplifying polynomials, factoring polynomials, graphing polynomials, finding domain and range of a given polynomial, and solving equations for a specific variable in terms of the other variable.

We worked on partial fractions and logistic growth today. Partial fractions have an easy algorithm that we went over once the how of it all had been explained, The student had no problems understanding it.

The student and I covered how to find the perimeter and area of shapes composed of rectangles. We also solved a few problems involving money (dollars and cents). His grasp of determining the length of an unknown side(s) improved, but there is room for improvement with calculator use.