Certified Tutors From University of California-Berkeley

The student has his final exam on Wednesday, so he completed some practice problems in various topics assigned by the online program used for his course, and then worked on a cumulative assignment. We will meet for one more session before his exam. He's making great progress in his preparations!

The student and I went sentence by sentence, stating what the purpose of each was in an informative essay. We got through the introduction and one body paragraph. We also read aloud from The Golden Compass.

We continued with learning the lessons in the student's French 1 class, such as new vocabulary and telling time. Most of the session was dedicated to telling the time in the French language, such as "Il est quatre heures vingt," or "Il est huit heures moins dix dans le matin," and so forth. We did many exercises, some with audio files, with regard to telling the time in French, and I helped with her pronunciation of French words such as "demie" and "le quart." We continued with each telling time exercise on an analog clock and a digital clock until she achieved perfect scores on each. We then covered the days of the week in the French language and also started on how to tell the date in French, i.e. "C'est le 1ere d'Avril." We learned the months in French as well, where I helped with mnemonics on the months (Mai, Juin, Juillet, Aout, etc.). Altogether, it was a productive session.

Today, we went over some problems from last week on using cylindrical form to solve a double or triple integral. After answering all questions that the student brought up, we went on to review for his upcoming test. We focused on finding the bounds given a set of equations or a picture with some equations defined.

The first part of the session was dedicated to working through the student's most recent math assignment, which again involved a problem set on ratios and their practical and geometrical applications. While the student demonstrated solid skills of mental calculation, there were times that the incorrect arithmetic procedure was employed out of eagerness to solve the problem. A little patience in reading and setting up the problem--particularly with regard to what figures and units in a proportion are being compared--will help to minimize errors. After he finished the assignment, we finished up the session by completing a number of drilled exercises, many of them involving the evaluation of radicals, in which the student expressed special interest.

We went over some problems from an old test the student had issues with, and then began reviewing the diagnostic test. We also spent some time reviewing parametrics and how to take derivatives of them, specifically using the fundamental theory of derivatives in order to find the formula for the second derivative of a parametric function.