Tutor Blogs

If I could go back in time, I would've continued to go to school right after undergrad. I waited and feel as though I wasted a lot of time. However, I am finding that it is never too late to continue. Although I am now continuing my education, in hind site, it would have been easier early in life because my responsibilities now are greater than 20 years ago. There is a lot to juggle, but I have faith that I will make it.

I am very passionate about learning. As a teacher of 18 years, I have always and still am thinking of new ways of making complex chemistry concepts comprehensible for students. My most memorable high school teacher was my algebra teacher. He was dynamic. I remember that an A grade according to him was actually an A2. This grading encouraged me to continue to want to be the best. He had a way of teaching that made it quite easy for me to attain those A2's in algebra. As he would always say, "KISS your work". When meant to "keep it simple-stupid". By doing this we could then apply what...

An easy and memorable way to teach the relationship between isotopes and average atomic mass is to calculate your grade point average (GPA). Just as each class grade contributes to your overall GPA, each atom in an element contributes to the element's average atomic mass. The atom or grade with the highest # frequency of occurrence (abundance) affects the average.

For example, 5A's, 1B, and 1C will give a grade that is close to the points of an A, which is 4.0. The average grade in this example is 3.57. The following formula can be used to get the average: [(# of grades) x (grade points)]...

Today I did a lesson with a young lady from Mount Vernon who was in danger of being left behind. We have been working together for the past few months. She struggled with Math, and had failed several tests, so of course, her mother was very concerned. Well, today the girl announced to me very proudly that she was one of only two students, out of 21, who passed her Math test with an 85! The other student that passed was her best friend. So, 19 kids failed the Math test, and my student did excellent on it! This girl had a fear of Math, but now she is very much looking forward to her Math...

If you want to draw a perfect circle, square, triangle, etc., there's a keyboard shortcut that makes it easy

• Navigate to the Microsoft Office application you want to use - we'll use PowerPoint for this example.
• On the Insert ribbon, click Shapes, then click on the shape you want ("oval," for example).
  If you're using an Office 2003 or earlier application, use the Insert menu.
• Click on the slide and hold down the mouse button.
• Press SHIFT and then drag the mouse down and to the right.
• When the shape is as large as you want it, release the mouse button.

NOTES

• If you want to draw an oval or rectangle...

Hi, folks,

I just wanted to let you know a little about me. :)

I have an MA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, Greensburg, and a BA in Literature with a Concentration in Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison. I've taught basic reading and writing on a college level.

I have about 13 years' experience in various types of writing and editing including articles, web copy, product descriptions, reviews, blog posts, marketing materials, manual writing, and instructive documentation. I've had five novels and three novellas professionally published or soon to be published,...

Highlighting is method of learning that I like to call color recognition. It was a technique I actually learned in high school. My biology teacher forced us to buy highlighters in blue, pink, yellow, green, orange, and purple (good luck finding purple by the way). Each color was assigned a specific reason. Blue is vocab, pink is definitions, yellow is time periods, etc. I put that lesson to extremely good use during bar prep. By highlighting in specific colors it forced me to really think about what the rule was and why it was important.

It doesn’t hurt that it makes the outlines far prettier...

In a journal article recently published, research shows that MRI can predict the efficacy of math tutoring on students published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled "Neural predictors of individual differences in response to math tutoring in primary-grade school children?".

Researchers found an association with pre-tutoring increased hippocampal volume along with tracts to other surrounding brain structures better predicts a student's amount of improvement with tutoring lessons. The hippocampus is involved in the functioning of various types of memory....

My Latin professor taught me a mnemonic device for subjunctive endings of Latin verbs in all conjugations of the present tense. I only have to remember the sentence, 'She wears a diamond tiara.' Verbs of the first conjugation employ the vowel 'e' of the word 'she.' For example, the present, subjunctive of the verb, 'to remember' (memorare), is conjugated as follows: memorem, memores, memoret, memoremus, memoretis, memorent. As for verbs of the second conjugation, the subjunctive endings of the present tense use the vowels 'e' and 'a' of the word 'wears.' The verb, 'to have'...

Last year, I decided to take an official GRE. To be honest, the main reason I took the test was to see if I could get a perfect score (bragging rights!). But I also wanted to get more familiar with the test - the GRE only provides one computer test and one paper test (the new version of its study guide will have four tests). So I paid the fee and scheduled a test.

Preparation: I didn't do any serious preparation for the test, other than reviewing statistics and hard probability a little bit (the only math areas in which I didn't feel confident). I didn't review all the weird stat stuff in the...