Certified Tutors From Mount St. Mary's College

The student and I covered functions, their first and second derivatives, their graphs, and how to graph from one to the other. She seemed very stressed out by the material initially, but calmed down once she started to realize that patterns of the process. She needs to remember to keep calm even though there may seem to be no answer or the answer seems elusive; in the end the she always gets it.

The student had a packet on inheritance, Mendelian genetics, and dominance. Initially she was anxious about the amount of content on this exam. The material became more clear for her as we applied the concepts to practice problems. It is a lot of material, but she does well on most questions. We will finish the packet and begin review on Thursday.

We went over new vocabulary words and practiced memorizing them. I taught the student some test taking strategies like crossing out the options that are wrong until you are left with the final answer. I showed him with multiple choice questions that "la" or "el" can be a hint to what word is possible and that we should use those hints to help cross out the wrong answers first. We then went over conjugation. He'd forgotten some of the verbs, so I told him to read them over and become comfortable with them again.

We covered limits. It was the student's first time seeing a limit, so he struggled at first understanding what they were. He had a good attitude towards the material. We talked a little about noticing indeterminate forms. I suggested that he look over some of the problems in his textbook before our next session.

When asked at the end how he thought he did, the student said "Ok!" He finished his reading homework early on and we started with math. The majority of the math was devoted to dividing mixed numbers and fractions. He was able to walk me through all of the steps for solving these types of problems. After completing most of the division problems, we worked on 2 out of 4 of the word problems (multiplying fractions in word problems, diameter, area of a circle). He felt confident in finishing the remainder on his own. One thing that was different about this evening was that he was playing music in the background (loud, screaming, heavy metal type music). He kept the volume low so it didn't bother me, and it really seemed to keep him calm while he was doing his problems.

In this session, I helped the student edit one of two graduate school application essays. He needed assistance with sentence structure, word choice, and verb tenses. He also asked for feedback about the appropriateness of his responses to the prompts.