Certified Tutors From Elgin Community College

Today the student and I worked on her math and science homework. In math, she is working on breaking down trinomials into factors. After a bit of a slow start we ended the assignment with a much better understanding of the process. The last bit of our session was spent studying acids and bases, and their characteristics.

The student and I spent the tutoring session working on arithmetic and geometric sequences, series, and means. She was able to read the problems and draw from them what the questions were asking for, but then was somewhat slow to know what to do next. We worked on being able to put the formulae that the program gave her into her own words, so that she could better understand them and ultimately be better able to use them. She was not excited to be learning what seemed like useless information, but we talked about how it could be used and that seemed to lighten her mood about doing series and sequences. The main strategies that we worked on were identifying what formula to use for a problem and stating what we know and what we are trying to get to. The student agreed to keep a list of questions she had throughout the week and email me if anything particularly tricky came up. By the end of the session she was doing the problems all on her own and much quicker than at the beginning. She showed remarkable progress and I look forward to building on this through future lessons.

The student and I studied for her history test. We first answered the four essay questions her teacher gave her. We next went through all of the terms she didn't know. We finished with me quizzing her on various questions, which she did well on.

The student had homework concerning translations and reflections for graphs of trig functions. We worked on breaking down the components of the equation and how they relate to the graph. We also practiced writing equations for a specific translation.

Since the student began his math analysis class 2 weeks behind, we focused a portion of this session on reviewing what he missed: chapter 1. We reviewed absolute values, inequalities and understanding the Cartesian coordinate system. We quickly moved into his current chapter 2 work. The current section dealt with analyzing a function and comparing it to its root (or simplified) function. Then to graph the function. We spent the end of the session reviewing new vocabulary for his English class.

During this session, trig functions and their graphs were reviewed by going over 5 review worksheets in preparation for the next week's test.