Certified Tutors From Lewis University

In this session, we worked on the student's final review and covered questions on ambiguous triangles, evaluating trigonometric functions without a calculator, and polynomials. She learned polynomials some time ago, so she needs a little refresher on the topic. I sent an email with some notes on polynomials. Good luck on your test!

We went over the topics for the student's Physics and Algebra courses. We looked ahead to what she would be covering in those courses after the holiday. She has brought both class grades up and is now consistently making high B's. One thing we discussed is her tendency to get nervous about lengthy word problems, even when she understands the math or physics necessary to answer the problems. We discussed strategies to keep calm and break the problems down into the necessary smaller pieces and how to think critically.

The student has a chemistry test tomorrow, so we went over the concepts of calculating mass percent, naming compounds, determining chemical formula, balancing chemical equation, calculating limiting and excess reagent, and so on. She did really well on the practice questions related to these concepts.

The student was working on a revision packet this week. Her greatest area of need was considering the upper and lower bounds of a number. Whole numbers were not a challenge, but considering decimals was. She would evaluate the upper bound of a number such as 5.5 correctly (5.55), but she would forget to include the entire lower bound, answering 5.50 or 5.49. This was remedied by considering the smallest number that would still round to 5.5. More practice may be required to cement the knowledge. We also worked on advanced sequences that required writing the terms as multiples of n. Once she saw that the terms can be considered as the same type, she was able to apply the theme to novel problems.

Today, we spent our session working Physics vector problems and finding resultant vectors and applying those skills to real world problems. The student was struggling with her diagrams, so I showed her the mathematical method to solve those problems. We also worked on free body diagrams.

We covered division properties and division. She was quick to pick up on division properties (i.e. half of hundreds using 5 as half of ten in new core algorithm). She was positive and working hard. The rest of her homework was left for practice Her test score went up to a C+ (78), with each question worth over two points up from a high D earlier. No concerns.