Certified Tutors From Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

In this session, we covered topics from probability, including probability trees, the counting principle, inclusive and exclusive events, and Venn Diagrams. The student was very quick to work out the nuances on many of the types of problems, including drawing items with and without replacement, and how it affects the space of possible outcomes. There was a bit of difficulty recognizing when a counting principle problem called for exponentiation rather than multiplication, but that was also quickly resolved. Since the student seemed comfortable with most of the material of the chapter, I decided to challenge them further by introducing conditional probability through advanced examples that run counter to one's intuition, such as the "Monty Hall" problem, and the seemingly contradictory answers to the "Boy or Girl Paradox" and "Bertrand's Box Paradox".

Today the student and I went over her synonyms and fill-in-the-blanks. Overall, she did better on the synonyms, which is rare. However, it's good because teaching strategies for FITB is easier than for synonyms. So we spent today going over her incorrect answers and then discussing strategies for FITB. I gave her work to do in her other prep book that will expand her vocab, and I also told her to look up words she doesn't know while she's reading. I will see her on Tuesday, when we will be having our sessions from now on.

The student had a physics test coming up, so we spent the session going through a PowerPoint that had been provided to her. She was a lot more comfortable with these topics, and was better able to jump to the right way to solve the problem. She had some difficulty in knowing which equation to use, but I helped her get a procedure to figure out what she needed. She ended up doing quite well on the test.

Today, the student continued to practice the strategies that we talked about, this time for math. She did a really good job pacing herself and practicing the over MO that she will use during the test. However, there were a few problems she felt sure of herself on that the book said were incorrect. So, we are going to go over those problems in an extra hour tomorrow and see if we need to change our strategy at all for her test.

The student and I went over more Gauss-Jordan elimination. I showed him a couple of tricks for solving with larger matrices.

We started the student's chapter related to ratios. After I explained the concepts, he solved questions from the exercise with minimum help. In the end we also did an ACT question related to trigonometry. He is very intelligent and grasped the concepts very quickly, however he makes mistakes when he does too many mental calculations instead of doing them step by step on paper. I have encouraged him to do questions step by step on paper, as this habit is useful when solving or reviewing complex calculations.