Award-Winning Test Prep & Academic Tutoring in San Anselmo, CA

The student is preparing for his final exams, which are scheduled for the following week. In preparation, I asked him to get started on his chemistry study guide between our scheduled sessions together. During this session, we went over the answers to his study guide questions and made sure he understood all concepts. We made a list of concepts he would like to review together. We covered how to find limiting reagents and excess reagents using stoichiometry. He seemed confident in solving this type of problem after we worked through just one together. He is very bright and eager to learn! We also went through his geometry study guide, which included mostly algebra. He seemed comfortable with the problem types given, so he wanted to mostly spend our time on chemistry.

The student is preparing for a test, so we reviewed several questions from old review packets, paying special attention to the definition of derivative and limits. He seems very confident and prepared.

This lesson turned out great! I found some practice problems for her and we went over them and now she and I are confident that she has these concepts down, like factoring for example. I am very confident with her. There are still a few concepts we need to go over but we have another lesson next tomorrow. I will be sure to have more practice problems as well!

We continued reviewing for the AP exam. The student has improved on definitions, conditions, and experiment setup. I quizzed her on normal distribution, chi squared tests, regression, and random sampling. She just needs to memorize how to calculate standard error for testing scenarios. We began to review how to identify which test to select. We then reviewed her previous work to make sure she understood her mistakes and how to correct them. She takes the AP exam in two weeks.

We prepared for a quiz over graphing three types of equations. The types of equations covered were linear, absolute value, and quadratic equations. The student had no problems graphing linear equations, especially if they were already in slope-intercept form. We discussed the method of how-to convert linear equations into slope-intercept form. Absolute values and quadratic equations proved a bit more difficult for him to digest. For absolute values, we began with a discussion regarding the parent function and its general v-shape. We discussed its translations and how to determine them for the equations. I switched from teaching a theory based method of graphing absolute value functions to an algorithm based method to simplify it for him. We broke it down into finding the vertex of the function (by finding the x value that made the absolute value zero) and taking a couple of test points around the vertex. He can apply the algorithm fairly well but still is not comfortable with the "why" behind the method. Once he became more comfortable with graphing absolute value function, graphing quadratics became less difficult because the methods were similar. We found the vertex and found test points to graph parabolas. Finding the vertex was easy when the function was already in vertex form but we had to complete the square to transform standard equations into vertex form.

We went over the different types of triangles that depend on angle and side measures. The student took a little while to remember all of them but eventually he had a solid grasp on the different types. After he finished his homework, we worked on a few system of equations problems because he felt he needed more practice. He made a few mistakes but for the most part, he was able to easily solve the problems.