Award-Winning Private History Tutoring in Norwalk, CA

The student and I had our first online session today. It went relatively well - we were able to cover 2 lessons and work on the free-response questions for those sections. We worked on the presidencies of President Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. We will be meeting again on Sunday and working on American literature.

Today, we covered the social and cultural issues of the 1920's in the United States. We examined the conflict between modernism and fundamentalism in both the urban and rural US, culminating in the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. Additionally, we examined the effects of prohibition on the American people. We completed the study guide and reviewed the politics of the 1920's US.

This week the student and I went over the causes and effects the Civil War, looking at the differing economies of the North and the South, and how the war stimulated the Northern economy and destroyed the South, as well as the social changes the war brought on. We also went over the war itself, including the changing strategies and the different command structures of the Confederate and Union armies. It was a particularly productive session in that we were able to cover an entire chapter.

For today's session, I worked with the student mainly on the Verbal portions of the exam. Although he performed well on the Vocabulary portion, I think he needs to improve a good amount on the logic questions. He also needs to start recognizing more words and understanding their meaning. This will be mainly done through learning new words and definitions through flashcards and reading higher level texts. There aren't too many concerns; however, due to the fact that this isn't a conceptual issue on the verbal portion, he understands the questions and how to dissect a question and get the answer. He just needs to learn more words. For the logic portion, he just needs to be aware of the extremes in the questions, for example if a question says that "x may happen," he should know to stay away from definite answer choices such as "x must happen." I feel that it would be best to focus on the Reading portion for the next session.

We covered mainly algebraic equations and how to solve them if they have or are multivariate in answer. We also tried to complete a couple of pretty complex SSAT (Upper level) inferential passages, and we still need more work on those to get the student to the place where he needs to be!

We reviewed what we learned during our last meeting concerning the use of articles, location and capitalization of titles, and combining of sentences. We then examined some of the student's workplace writing and discussed ways to improve it. She continues to occasionally forget articles before nouns when writing, but she spotted them well when we reviewed her work during the session. We also discussed when to use different constructions of past tense verbs and how the choice of construction depends on the meaning of the sentence. I provided a chart on past tense verbs and some outside resources for reference and additional practice.