Award-Winning Test Prep & Academic Tutoring in Caldwell, NJ

"We started our lesson by reviewing the student's math homework on adding and subtracting negatives. We spend the rest of the lesson working on reading comprehension and analogies. "

"We talked at length about the student's current test-taking methods for the Science Reasoning and Reading Comprehension sections. I then critiqued his approaches and provided other strategies that might prove more efficacious given his specific strengths and weaknesses. He intimated that that the Literature passage were the most difficult type for him because of the lack of clear topic sentences and discrete facts; this makes it difficult for him to establish main ideas and draw correct inferences. I first iterated the fact that Literature passages do indeed contain data, but it just of a different sort, and one crucial piece of data will be his own reader's reaction, as this will clue him into the author's purpose and rhetorical strategies. In terms of strategy, I advised that he tackle the Literature passage last if it has historically been his weakest section. His reading speed is adequate, but much of the time is spent hunting after details, and so I advised that he map the passages with a single idea/ phrase attached to each paragraph, which will both facilitate the drawing of a general passage idea, and also provide him with a road map to refer to when answering questions referring to specific lines. We then discussed the different passage types on the Science Reasoning section, and established a preferred order in which to tackle the passages. We discussed the features and associated strategies of each passage type, which contrasted significantly with his own approach. I advised that rather than skimming, he read these passages more carefully to reduce the amount of time re-reading the text when answering questions. Over the course of the session, I used two reading passages from my own resources, and one science question. I will be emailing further exercises to tackle and discuss for the next session. "

"In this tutoring session, the student practiced TOEFL reading and learned at least 40 new TOEFL vocabulary words. She is showing significant improve in recognizing incorrect information as well as information not mentioned in the passage. In addition, she learned several new strategies when doing "Negative Fact Questions," such as be aware that often the three correct answer choices are spread across several paragraphs. In addition, she did very well in today's TOEFL vocabulary quiz and scored 94 on the vocabulary quiz. Well done!"

"The student asked me to help him with an English paper he had to write on how social responsibility was highlighted in "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also had to highlight the literary techniques that were used. He chose irony, symbolism, and characterization. He wrote the essay and then we edited it together. He made the changes and printed it out to turn in tomorrow."

"Today, the student and I continued our preparation for her exam tomorrow. I felt the session went very well considering the huge volume of material she has. I feel we prepared well for this exam. We covered natural logarithms and exponential functions and how to take derivatives of each. We tried a few word problems dealing with optimization as well. We also reviewed much of the material from yesterday like the 1st and 2nd derivative tests, limits at infinity, and finding vertical asymptotes. "

"The student was struggling with long division. We reviewed basic math operations such as adding, multiplying, and solving one-step equations. We will continue to work on long division. "

"1) We covered Logs, and the inverse to those functions.2) She struggled mostly with understanding the meaning. We went over it thoroughly and she understood it better after that.3) Although it was the first time doing Logs, she felt pretty confident once we went over some examples.4) We went over some ways to quickly graph Log functions, with transitions. Once we did a few examples, she was cool.5) She had extra practice with her homework.6) This was a new subject for her, but she picked up pretty well."

"The student has her final this week and this was our last session before the big test. The student felt confident in her knowledge with graph theory and related concepts interpreting graphs and describing graphs by types of vertices and edges. She expressed concern over vocabulary and conceptual knowledge with preference tables and apportionment, so we focused on those topics. I selected practice questions from her book that would represent good comparisons between like terms and also created my own problems to aid in these distinctions. The student was proud to show me that after a few sessions her most recent test score has improved significantly. I really am proud of the student and her progress! "