Certified Tutors From Seattle Community College-Central Campus

The student and I reviewed what we went over last week. We reviewed her vocabulary words and her research paper notes and information. We will be meeting next Wednesday.

We worked on adding and subtracting mixed numbers. I came up with a way for him to properly focus that I think will work for him. It certainly worked tonight. He now crosses out numbers he is not using. I left a couple of worksheets for him to use and we will go over them next week.

For our first meeting I focused on seeing how well the student was able to read out loud, tell time and work out math word problems. For reading, I discovered that she often adds syllables, and even though she does a good job sounding out the letters in a word she has trouble putting them together to finally understand the meaning of what she's reading. I've decided that we are going to focus on "chunking" parts of a word so that she will begin to memorize common chunks so that she won't have to sound out every syllable. For telling time, she understands the short hand but has trouble with the long hand. We will also be working on mental math shortcuts so that she isn't so reliant on counting with her fingers. Lastly, we will be working on more math word problems so that she will begin to understand how to glean important information from the problem so that she will be able to solve it.

The student and I continued to cover time value of money, determining the periodic rate, effective annual rate, annual percentage rate and estimating what payments would be on an amortizing loan. He seemed to be a bit more confident in what he was doing as far as the subject matter, a nice change from last week. He had a test last week but has not received a grade as of yet - I will check in with him tomorrow to see if he has received it so that we can review at our next session. I did give him a few strategies to use for approaching the questions especially for exam preparation and practice.

The student had a few things for homework. He understands word problems very well; he benefits from having great reading comprehension. After the homework, we reviewed a lot of multiplication and division facts. I tried to get him to see the patterns, as he does between addition and subtraction. He had some trouble going in certain directions in a multiplication problem (4 x 4 = 20 is easy, but 4 time ? = 20 is difficult). This slows him down on division problems. The more we do, the more he will memorize them. He will also become comfortable with the form of the problems, as well as certain mental math tricks that help him on the ones that are his least favorite.

We worked through asymptotic functions, getting into sloped asymptotes, as well as sketching functions and understanding discontinuities and real world applications of functions. I think the student is starting to retain more.