Certified Tutors From Tacoma Community College

The student and I went over some math and chemistry problems he encountered during class. Through some explaining, I think he's grasped the concepts completely.

During this session, the student and I reviewed factoring. She had a positive attitude and after a brief refresher of algebra skills from the previous school year, she moved along fairly quickly with the problems we practiced. Among these included the differences of squares strategy, target product/ target sum, recognizing a common factor to factor out of an expression, and using a strategy that she learned from her algebra teacher to factor expressions with a number other than one in front of x^2. I also suggested tips to manage her school work better like color coding her tasks in her agenda based on priority or order that she needs to complete them in to prepare for exams or meet certain deadlines. We then began making flashcards for her upcoming world geography test. Great session.

The student is an engaging young man. We talked about expectations and he wants to do better in reading and math. I did some preliminary work with questions and answers about his reading/LA class and what they have done. We were able to ascertain his possible likes and dislikes in reading/LA. He seems to have problems remembering things, but is engaging well in school. We also did some early math to figure out where his strengths lie. He is good at adding and subtracting. Multiplication was a little rougher. Overall, the day was good and we should do well together.

This was my final session with the student before her SAT tomorrow. Since we covered math yesterday, we focused primarily on reading today. We started with a practice test in the SAT book, working through some vocabulary questions and then a passage, discussing principles along the way like always. We looked at a few sample reading sections like this. At the end, we reviewed general tips for each portion of the test, such as when to guess and how to narrow answers down. She has shown a lot of improvement. I recommended that she do only a tiny bit of review tonight so that she can rest her brain, and that she go to bed early tonight and eat a good breakfast in the morning. She should do well on her test tomorrow.

We covered stoichiometry and molarity. The student understands the basic concepts but has some trouble understanding word problems. Once she knows what they are asking for, she normally does well. We will continue to go over word problems next session.

In this session, we worked with dividing rational expressions, using division to find the equation of a slant asymptote and how to divide rational expressions using both long division as well as synthetic division.