Award-Winning Private Organic Chemistry Tutoring in Surprise, AZ

This week we met and went over review questions for the exam. Most of the material was fine, though a few times the solutions given went off the deep end and made things harder than they needed to be. I hope the test goes really well, and we'll pick up with some more computer work next Monday. Have a great rest of your week and a relaxing weekend!

The student worked on a review packet over reaction rates, what variables affect the reaction rate of a chemical reaction, concentration, particle size, catalysts, bond stability, activation energy, particle collision theory, and what will increase the probability that particles will collide.

The student and I worked on Lewis dot structures (which she missed in class), and the periodic trend of atomic radius. She seems to get the concepts well, and when she goes through the steps carefully, the problems are not too hard.

We covered formulas, naming formulas and the rules with that, ionizations of different elements depending on the column they are in, and determining the atomic mass of different elements. The student is doing very well in the course. I am not having to highlight everything to know about the problems, as she is getting almost all of it. We are meeting tomorrow to review the previous chapters we've worked on because she has a test coming up.

In this session we covered the kinematics section in the review book. Once the student refreshed his memory on the big five equations for kinematics, he did very well on the multiple choice. I then directed him to a free-response question that required a higher level of familiarity with the material; he successfully solved the first three parts, but was lost on the last part of the question. Because that part was an unprecedented application of kinematics, I worked through the solution with him as an example for his notes.

The student and I went over some electric circuit problems and he has a much better understanding of how to process those kinds of problems. Then we looked at SHM problems, but using damped harmonic motion, which is not an AP topic. Still, we worked it out! Finally, he had some questions about waves and wave motion, leading into sound waves. This was a good session.