Certified Tutors From West Georgia Technical College

Today we worked on horizontal and vertical parabolas. The student seemed pretty comfortable with these topics. I think the only thing she had a little trouble with was setting up the word problems but, once she got the hang of it, it went very well.

When we were working through review exercises, I realized that the student still needs practice simplifying and comparing fractions. I gave the student some different methods for simplifying fractions, the definition of "percent" as "over 100", and worked through some comparing fractions games. I encouraged her to review using the online games we had played previously for practice.

The student and I reviewed various derivative and integration problems. I texted her pictures of solutions for a couple problems we did not finish.

The student and I went over the topics of evolution, Darwin, natural selection, gene pools, the Hardy-Weinberg Principle and how to calculate it, homologous/analogous structures, speciation, phylogeny and taxonomy. Overall the session went very well and she understood the material.

The student and I started the session with looking closely at a quiz he took and which he scored well on. We looked at the three questions he missed on a twenty-six question quiz and formulated strategies on how to answer "all of the following except" quiz questions, since two of the questions he missed were comprised of "all of the following except" questions. Aside from these type of questions, he performed very well, and at a glance at this quiz I could tell that he had studied hard. After we looked at the quiz, he then wrote the first draft of his AP World History essay on the contrasts between the ancient Greeks and the Persian Empire. There were specific requirements for the assignment, and he fulfilled them all: describe the political and cultural life of the Greeks in contrast with the Persians; describe the Royal Road of the Persian Empire, what its functions were, and its advantages and details; use the key words coinage, infrastructure, and caravan; describe Greece's culture, characteristics, and how Greek city-states/ poleis formed an early form of democracy. I helped the student with utilizing the "speech" mechanism on his school pad, and he found it to be very helpful as an adjunct to reading the text of his class history book as well. We went further into the contrasts between the two civilizations and wrote the main body and conclusion for his draft with main points we discovered, such as the Greek city-states and Greece as a whole being a fraction of the population size of the huge population of the Persian Empire. We also wrote how the Greek poleis started as aristocracies in government but then became democracies as all classes were able to afford armor for conscription into the Greek armies, whereas the Persian Empire was a monarchy and part theocracy based on an autocratic god-king. We also detailed how the Greeks were exclusive of foreigners while the Persian Empire was very inclusive, appreciative, adoptive, and admirable of foreign cultures that they conquered and how the Greeks at the time didn't expand into an empire since they were never centralized while the centralized Persians expanded into a vast empire with a communication network and early "postal system." I then suggested to the student that he email his first draft to his teacher for input and advice, to seek what his teacher is looking for in this assignment. He will then rewrite the paper, writing for his teacher's ideal for this essay. A productive session where the student learned about the social, political, cultural, and economic contrasts of two civilizations that were very different stories in the human record. We also discussed and made history fun and enlightening by musing about a possible third invasion of Greece by the Persian army during the Greco-Persian Wars and also discussed the Persian god-king Darius, a very interesting historical figure.

We went over the student's homework on the applications of derivatives, which included the EVT, IVT, optimization, and an introduction to antiderivatives. During our session, I explained the concepts of the section, and he worked on the assignment.