Award-Winning Private ISEE Tutoring in Lancaster, CA

The work of this session focused on vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing. As is typical in our sessions, we warmed up by reviewing vocabulary flashcards. The student has his vocabulary down! We studied all of his cards in "rapid-fire" mode. It is truly remarkable how far he has come with his retention. Throughout our sessions, I have developed a trend of leading him through all of the fundamentals pertaining to the placement exam (math, verbal, reading) and spicing it up with drills and tactics from the Middle and Upper Level materials. We are down-to-the-wire, with just two sessions left, and I wanted to continue this trend with a heavy emphasis on reading comp and writing (he has his math skills down). To this end, I gave him a Middle Level reading comprehension practice test, which he completed in 28 minutes, and scored 28 out of 40 correct, one Middle Level writing exercise, and one Upper Level writing exercise. All in all, this was a very strong and reaffirming session! The student has come so far and I told him that I was proud of him. He seems to be more confident than ever in his abilities to successfully complete the exam.

The student did a great job today. She has a great understanding of the different components of the test, so we did some diagnostic work to see what areas she should specifically focus on for our next sessions. We covered each area- verbal, quantitative, math, and reading, and we did a sample of questions from each. We also had time for a writing prompt- something she'll have to do during the test as well. She loves to write, and she can get lost in her writing, so she expressed concern for time management. I'll plan to provide her with strategies to combat that as we work on essays together. Finally, she has some practice books that she's eager to work in. I recommended she work in them between sessions to practice the strategies we discuss.

The student took the Reading Comprehension and Verbal Reasoning sections of the practice test today. She did very well. Our session mainly focused on the process of writing an effective essay. I emphasized the importance of responding to and focusing on the topic at hand. I did leave her with two essay prompts that she will work on and have ready for our next session.

The student and I reviewed the math with calculator section. We also review coordinates related functions and calculations, statistics related concepts and calculations, and reading, interpreting, and applications of pie charts and bar charts.

The student and I reviewed the notions of limits and continuity introduced in our previous session, and we then dove into our first true lesson in calculus, with a serious discussion of rates of change and the derivative. We covered average vs. instantaneous rate of change as it relates to secant slope vs. tangent slope and how to determine the tangent slope (which we call the derivative) at a value of a function by using the difference quotient. We looked at both versions of the difference quotient. For homework, he will view online videos on the derivative and do practice problems. We will continue on Thursday with the idea of differentiability and differentiation rules.

The student and I reviewed the practice SAT that she took last week. She struggled more on math, so we talked about which concepts were harder for her and did some practice problems. We also reviewed the reading portion of the exam. For next week, she is going to purchase prep books that we selected together so that we can start to work on content review.