Award-Winning Writing Tutors serving Reading

In this morning session, the student was very efficient. She read TOEFL readings on the topics of Anthropology and Psychology, and gained much new TOEFL vocabulary. In addition, she also practiced her strategies on TOEFL reading. In the TOEFL vocabulary quiz, she got 38 out of 40 correct.

Agenda 1. I spent the first couple of minutes getting both of them set up with a folder I created on my Google Drive that contains homework for them to do in between our sessions. 2. I taught them how to write complex sentences using subordinating conjunctions. 3. I taught them how to write appositives.

The student and I finished the extended essay this evening! This is a huge accomplishment, and she should be very proud of the paper she produced. The main focus of today was line-by-line editing and cutting to get the word count in range. We also double checked the quotes and the entire paper's formatting against the provided exemplars. This was our final meeting on this project.

We went over two items from English class -- a homework and a quiz. In the quiz, we corrected two sets of answers -- one column were really translations of Shakespeare into more modern English, and the other column was identifying what kind of literary device was used, such as metaphor or personification. The translations were really much better after we talked about their meanings and making sure that all the elements in each passage were present. The literary devices took a bit longer because we talked about why authors use such elements. We rewrote the answers. It was important to see what had not been done to a high enough quality and how to reach that quality.

I was very pleased to find that the student had done the homework I assigned her last time, and in fact had done a very nice job of writing the paragraphs. We finished up the essay we had started, and then moved on to working on a larger upcoming project she's got: a rather long essay to be handed in as part of her Black Belt ceremony. As the essay is rather long, I thought it best to begin by brainstorming, and the black belt assignment had a number of prompts for discussion, which we used. I asked her to take some time over the next week to think about it further, as well as to write out answers to some of the questions on the prompt. Next week, we can begin organizing our ideas and writing the essay proper.

The student and I spent our session going over rounding to the nearest tenth, hundredth, and thousandth decimal place. He still needs more practice with this. I offered to send his Mom a practice work sheet if she feels he has time to complete it along with his normal school work.