Many of my tutoring clients who work with me on Algebra tell me that they have difficulty with word problems. They can do the math, they say, they just have a hard time figuring out what the question is asking them. If this applies to you, please read on because I will show you a…
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One Calculus topic that seems to challenge my tutoring clients every year is the topic of Taylor series. It usually comes up near the tail end of their Calculus class, and it is touted as a method to come up with an “approximation” to a function. Most Calculus textbooks introduce Taylor series with a scary-looking…
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The AP® Physics 1 exam is one of many Advanced Placement exams offered by the College Board. If you are taking AP Physics 1, you may be wondering if it’s the right time to purchase a test prep book for your upcoming exam in May. Perhaps you have already started looking on Amazon or elsewhere,…
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One of the big ideas that Chemistry students are introduced to pretty early in the class is the concept of the mole. A significant percentage of the calculations in Chemistry class depend on this concept, so a clear understanding of moles is really helpful not just for its own sake, but for understanding large portions…
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“Do you offer in-person sessions?” This is by far the most common question that prospective parents ask me as an online tutor. And I can see why. We are not so far removed from the COVID pandemic of 2020 that parents and students have forgotten what it was like to experience distance learning. Students joylessly…
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Many Physics students get overwhelmed when they start their first Electricity & Magnetism (E&M) class, even if they were pretty good at Mechanics. And it is hard to blame them. Most of them have at least an intuitive feel for concepts like mass, velocity, momentum, and gravity, and they feel that these ideas in Mechanics…
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In part 1 of this blog series, I shared a foolproof method for graphing transformed sine and cosine functions using the Eight Blanks method. I am going to show you how to extend this method to cover the other four trigonometric functions you typically encounter in Trig class: tangent, cotangent, secant, and cosecant. The base…
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One of the big challenges my tutoring clients often face in Trigonometry class comes when they are asked to graph trigonometric functions with different amplitudes, periods, and shifts. Even when clients understand the basic principles, they often find it hard to keep track of and condense all the information they are given into one single…
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Your Math class may have introduced you to a type of word problem called an optimization problem, sometimes referred to as a min / max problem. The objective of these is always the same: to find the maximum or minimum possible value of some quantity named in the problem. The weird thing about these problems…
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In the first blog post of this series, I showed you a method to solve stoichiometry problems that helps you keep organized and avoid getting confused. Most of my clients like this approach. However, one of my clients told me, “I think your method makes sense, but my teacher won’t let me do it this…
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