Certified Tutors From Brookdale Community College

The student and I continued our work on sequences with the added element of radius of convergence for sums including variables. We clarified what it means to converge conditionally and we also went over tactics on how to decide which test will be most useful to determine convergence or divergence. Great work!

In this session, the student and I worked on reading and math. I gave him some drills to work on reading. Although he did very well in answering the questions correctly, he still needs to work to improve his speed by doing more practice reading problems with a timer and reading outside materials. We then worked through math together, and he seems to have a good grasp of most of the concepts on this section. I asked him to take a full practice test before next session.

We briefly went over his work in chemistry today to see how he was faring in class. He showed me what they were studying in class at the moment (chemical vs. physical properties) so I gave him a brief primer on how to distinguish between the two. For most of the session, he worked on his algebra class, in which he was studying matrices. He didn't seem to have too much trouble with understanding the concept of adding/subtracting/multiplying matrices. We had some spare time left over as well so we moved ahead of his class and covered tomorrow's lesson.

The student and I went over graphing cotangent, cosecant, secant, and tangent graphs. We went over how to find the period, amplitude, phase shifts, vertical shifts, and domain and range for each of these. We worked on graphing them, creating equations given information about the graph, and comparing graphs to their parent functions. She was wonderful, as always!

The student and I covered geometric sequences. Specifically, we covered finding the explicit formulas of geometric sequences given a couple of terms in the sequence. These problems involve a number of careful steps, and she did well patiently working with these problems. By the end of the session, she showed much better understanding of how to find the explicit formulas of geometric sequences and could walk me through detailed problems almost entirely without my help.

We reviewed strategies for solving word problems. Mostly we focused on how to write equations from given information. The student had some trouble with this, as he didn't always understand when to add the variables or when to subtract, but I would say he has a good basic understanding. He was also able to tell when his answers did not make sense, and was able to revise his equations.