Certified Tutors From Roger Williams University School of Law

Today, the student and I covered expressions with rational numbers. He was struggling when there were negative numbers and exponents. We covered the order of operations in order to clarify these concepts. He was very excited to learn the material but needed help on concepts due to a couple of simple mistakes. I will send him more practice questions to get him ready for next session.

The student and I worked some more on exponentiation. I expect his teacher will cover the basics of exponents in a more high-school sort of way, so I tried to explore it from a different angle: exponentiation is just iterated multiplication. As multiplication is iterated addition, some of the properties of multiplications of sums hold true for exponentiation of a product. It sounds complicated but the student picked it up pretty quickly. He now seems to understand some of the important properties, and can use them to prove random trivia. On Wednesday we'll solidify his understanding. The other student and I discussed her homework which seemed to be an intro to graphing. She had some misconceptions about the questions but quickly understood what was going on. We then reviewed some multiplication problems. She's making good progress.

Today I worked with the student on physics and half life. We went over how to use the half life formula and I took this opportunity to give him some general math and algebra tips for future questions. He had some trouble understanding what the numbers meant but given the proper questions, he was able to organize the information and solve the problems. He was extremely appreciative of my help and asked if I could tutor him next school year. I worked with him on algebra. We went over the free response section, spanning the entire year's worth of information in these questions. We went over patterns, digits, minutes, seconds of angle measurements, roots, trig functions, calculator shortcuts, interquartile range, quadratic formula, log, ln, inequalities, absolute values, radians to degrees, law of sines, and a2+b2=c2.

The student completed her homework on solving real situations involving quadratic equations. The questions involved parabolic motion. I explained to her what each coefficient in the equation represented. I also showed her how to use excel to solve equations and plot graphs in excel.

This is my first session with the student and he brought me a homework that was due the next day as well as practice problems. The problems were on inequalities and graphing inequalities, domains, and range. He had some trouble finding the domain and range at first, as well as graphing the inequalities. We went over every concept that was troubling him and he gained a better grasp of the concepts. We also did some problems from a practice worksheet on the same topic. He is smart and catches on fast.

We reviewed histograms, stem and leaf plots, quartiles, and percentiles. We also computed means and standard deviations for some data sets. I showed the student how to use the statistical routines on his calculator.