Award-Winning Test Prep & Academic Tutoring in West Falls, NY

"I spent this evening working on factoring whole numbers with the student and with simplifying basic fractions. He did demonstrate a basic understanding of the problems we went over. I left some practice assignments with his mother for him to work on over the week."

"First the student wanted to look at his homework from that day. He was having difficulty with graphing parabola equations that he needed to determine the focus and direction. First we looked at the form of the formula...y^2 = 4(p)x or x^2 = 4(p)y. Once he knew he needed to be able to breakdown the given numbers into 4*p he was able to work through all the problems with ease. Next he wanted to look back at a previous homework assignment. In a section where 2 points were given, he needed to determine the equation of the perpendicular bisector of those 2 points. I took out some graph paper and we went through each of the 6 problems by drawing them first. The visualization factor really helped when he needed to figure out the slope and midpoint. We also went over the formulas for slope and midpoint. Even with being able to see the points on the paper and their absolute distance from each other, he still struggled to tell me how far apart they were. Since drawing his own graph on a test would be too subjective for finding distances, I drew a number line. I had him find the values for x and count the spaces between them. Then I had him do the same for the y values. Since the number line can be used again and again and does not take up the space of a graph, the student agreed this was a method he could replicate on a test. Finding the equations of the perpendicular bisectors was relatively easy after the student was able to identify slope and midpoints. "