Certified Tutors From Cayuga County Community College

Concepts Covered: The student and I focused this session on working through the distributive property in conjunction with further rules of exponents. Additionally, we worked on ordering polynomials as well as monomial and binomial multiplication. We also went over Factorization, Greatest Common Factor, and Prime Factorization. Struggles: The student still struggles with some minor details, as well as remembered which algorithms to follow in given circumstances. However, this improved greatly over the course of the session. Attitude: The student had an excellent attitude and curiosity for this session. She asked multiple questions and was very positive. Strategies: We went over the FOIL method and the grid method of multiplying binomials (she noted that she preferred the FOIL method), as well as how to factor out any given number. We also went over how to figure out all of the factors of any given number using its prime factorization. Extra Practice: None assigned. Scores/Grades: She shared that she scored an 80% on her most recent test. We will review the text during our next session - as well as further test preparation for her next test. Concerns/Wins: The student continues to improve in her confidence towards her abilities. I did not need to intervene nearly as much and she self-corrected multiple problems on her own. Additionally, the pace that we move through problems has dramatically increased.

Today we reviewed for the exam by starting with gel electrophoresis, the structure of a nucleotide, the differences between RNA and DNA, and we did exam practice questions. The student also completed an endocrine lab and we discussed how to identify certain endocrine disorders based on lab results.

The student worked on her reading homework, and then focused on creating nonsense words with phonics. She did very well and I will miss her!

This was a good session. We worked on more vocabulary. We worked on idioms as compared to physical or technical meanings of terms and phrases. We worked on pronouncing "v" as opposed to "w" and the "th" sound in English as these are sounds the student struggles with. We started reading the book Peter Pan. She will continue reading this book on her own and will record any words she does not understand which we will go through at our next session. We also made plans to work on pronouns next week. She still struggles a little with which pronoun to use when. So we will work on that to make it perfect! This was a good session. She is coming along but she still has a ways to go. Mostly, she needs to keep adding vocabulary every week. She understands sentence structure much better from the first week we met. She also is understanding how American English differs from British English and how Americans use many idioms or metaphorical phrases rather than the literal meanings of words.

The student and I covered limits, differentiation by the product rule, and differentiation by the quotient rule.

The student's getting a handle on what we mean by counterexamples, and what constitutes a valid argument. Had a breakthrough on what we mean by inverses of conditional statements, and how they relate to the converse and the contrapositive. She could stand to be a bit more organized, though, particularly on turning in homework. As far as extra practice, I just strongly advised that she take some time on her own to go over at least some of the assigned homework before our sessions.