Award-Winning Test Prep & Academic Tutoring in Chalco, NE

The student and I spent more time going over her take home practice test from spring break. There were many different types of problems we went over. We spent a bit of time going over limits, and the shortcuts on how to solve limits when x->infinity. She has experience doing every kind of problem that can be on the AP test; it is just a matter of recognizing what problem is asking you to do, and that just takes practice. I know she said she has a few more practice tests to do before the big test day.

The student and I discussed questions on the review packet for her upcoming test. The questions were pertaining to simplifying rational expressions and solving word problems involving distance, rate and time. I showed her how to set up a table to organize the information in the word problem in order to make solving for the missing entity easier. We also discussed looking for that key piece of information that brings the pieces of the problem together. This went very well. For extra practice, she is to complete sb# 25 as additional practice for her upcoming assessment. We have practiced the other skills on the test prior to this session as she feels very confident with them. As always, it was a pleasure working with her.

The student was a confident student today! She had lots of energy as she explained what she needed to do. First, she chose to finish her homework and she knew her answers were correct. She asked me to help her with one that confused her. It was about decimals and seeing the number in a different way. She had to explain why 26 tenths was more than 2.06, so we discussed what it would look like in decimal form and it seemed to click that 26 tenths were equal to 2.6. Later, she saw a similar problem and was able to complete it correctly. Next, we worked on a daily worksheet which had more decimal work. She did well on most of this page except one part where her teacher wanted her to correct 3 sets of decimals which were out of order. She had to rethink the numbers and place them in increasing or decreasing order. She quickly found her mistakes and moved on! Another question asked her to explain why rounding to the nearest tenth and whole could have the same answer. We talked it through and she gave an excellent response. She just needs to slow down, look at the situation, use what she knows, and she can do the work or write out a great explanation. She has really improved! We moved on to practice fractions because she still needs to see the relationship between fractions and decimals. We had time to compare fractions, order them from least to greatest, and review changing improper fractions to mixed numbers.

The student worked on his homework, which covered material about using the second derivative to find concavity and points of inflection. He reports that he isn't fully comfortable with understanding the material conceptually, though from a practical standpoint, he does understand it very well (i.e., he is perfectly capable of solving problems from this material, even if he doesn't fully get why it works).

For this session, Student 1 and I worked on a practice test overviewing linear inequalities, as she had a test on it the next day. It was 14 questions long, and it went by relatively quickly and simply without any issues. Student 2 and I worked on 2 dimensional vectors and their dot products, along with finding the normal/orthogonal vectors of each given vector. The few questions she had left were a bit time consuming, but she was able to complete the homework easily, without too many issues. Student 3 worked on angles and other normal polygons that are not triangles. Since he had the majority of his homework already done, we did not have too much to work on, but the questions that he had left were completed quickly. He an excellent job in identifying the issue and tackling the problems correctly.

Overall, great session today. The student was engaged, and demonstrated crucial skills as I taught them to him, and tested him on along the way. Topics Reviewed: (1) Applications of Pythagorean Theorem to find missing side length for right triangles (2) How to put radical in simplest form, perfect squares method and prime factorization method (3) How to classify triangles as right, acute, or obtuse, given side lengths. I'm seeing progress in his confidence. My main recommendation, as always, is to make sure he's practicing math problems he's receiving in class as often as possible. Practice makes perfect. As always, it was a pleasure tutoring him, and I look forward to our next session.