Brena's Tutoring Blog

I recently started working with a pair of twins who are preparing for the GED. They were both panicking about the math section. Having struggled with life as young women with no high school diploma, they are reevaluating the value of high school and their decision. Trying to study with any member of their family didn't work very well. Both parties got frustrated quickly. One member has a tendency to read half a problem and say, "well that's so easy; you should get that really quickly." Another family member is an avid intellectual who really doesn't support the decisions they've made....

I was helping a student through some ACT prep work, focusing on math. We came across a defined function problem that looked somewhat like this:

Let x [] y = (x^2)/(y-2). What is 2 [] 6 ?
She asked, "Am I supposed to find []?"
I responded, "No, it tells you what [] does. It takes the thing on the right, squares it, and divides it by the thing on the right minus 2 *pointing*."

She was able to work it out from there, but this got me thinking. When we introduce students to grammar, we discuss parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. When we introduce algebra, we usually only use...