MGTutoring.com. A Rational Perspective on Education.

Well, time to get back to school. Some students (actually, their parents) have been really smart, and have gotten tutoring most every week this summer. They’ll be ready to hit the ground running, and they’ve taken time to learn things they might not otherwise learn — most importantly, how to reason, how to learn.

And some students have started to get back into the swing of things recently. They’ve been able to review concepts and methods they have forgotten (e.g., how to graph a line!!), and have been able to gain a context for why we do math — a context they will only rarely get anywhere else, and a context that involves math, not merely points out its history and application. Good for them!

Nice: worked with a student for only 6 hours, and helped get his SAT score up 90 points. Would have been even better if he’d have studied on his own.

And a geometry student made a 96 on his last test. Just in time for his birthday.

Still busy here. Things have slowed down a little since students in college are done for the semester, but there is still work to do, and lots of personal odds and ends to catch up on.

Thursday, yesterday, had a good ending: two hours of tutoring for the SAT in which a student learned some effective ways to attack some math, reading and sentence correction questions — but also learned a bit about logic and reasoning. He’ll find this only rarely. Unfortunately. I wish such things as I taught were all over the country. How much better the culture would be…

Then one hour tutoring a student in geometry — specifically, in the Pythagorean Theorem and similar right triangles. And, wow, what I was able to relate these things to: reasoning, logic, science, law, history, and more. All in an effective, relevant way, using concretized abstractions. And all in a way that, too, will be found only rarely. Unfortunately.

Next up: helping some people with a dead battery, after I did a 10 PM shopping stint at my local HEB. They just needed jumper cables; they already had a big truck to give them a jump. I liked the look in the husband’s eye and the strength of his handshake. It’s nice to help people who are good (well…who seem decent, as that is all I really know about them).

And then, to my surprise, and pleasure, someone asked, while I was waiting at a stop light on the way home from HEB, if I tutored for the SAT. (She saw my “MGTutoring” graphics on the back of my truck.) I had a flier with me in my briefcase, so I got out of my truck and gave it to her husband. I liked seeing the gleam in his eye and the smile on his face when I handed the flier over. Priceless.

Things have been busy lately, and so it has been difficult to do any decent blogging.

This past Saturday, for example, I taught two hours of calculus and two hours of TAKS math. (An unusually light day, thank goodness! A break! Yay! I got to sleep till 10 AM!! I so needed that.)

But Sunday started at 8:20 AM and was not over until I made it back home after 10 PM. The day was comprised of two+ hours of algebra 2, an hour and a half of algebra 1, an hour of geometry, two other classes for two hours, then two hours of TAKS math.

And Monday was a long day spent tutoring math for ten hours: the day started at 8:15 AM and did not end until 10:20 PM, with some of this time spent on the road, and some spent at home tutoring on the Internet. First thing up was a math marathon at 9 AM, doing 5 hours of college algebra, all with one student; then two hours of TAKS math with another student; then an hour of algebra with a third; and finally two hours of AP calculus to finish my day. Monday, like Saturday and Sunday, was also spent teaching students reasoning and logic. We focused heavily on math, of course, but ranged from there to important, essential connections concerning (depending on the student and what time allowed) thinking skills, note taking skills, logic, Socratic questioning, ancient Greece, Aristotle, Plato, deduction, induction, science, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, nutrition, and more. Students saw — in general terms and in particular detail — how not merely to do math but how to reason; they learned how math teaches reasoning; they saw how math applies to other areas of life; and they saw the importance of math and of ideas. They are getting a quality education like they will rarely or never find anywhere else. And I love it.

After working with a fifth-grade student today, teaching her arithmetic via Elluminate‘s vRoom, I received a nice note from her mother:

Awesome math class today! I’m glad you went with the hour [instead of stopping at a half hour]. I loved the connection [of fractions] to history [to kings collecting grain, people constructing buildings, and more] and to selling a fraction of a partial ownership of a 1400s Italian merchant ship, but most of all I loved when you pushed her to articulate her understanding of the material. She is slowly gaining confidence in her understanding of math and becoming much more cooperative in her math work throughout the week. — Deborah G

Student: “Gotten most of the rules [of calculus derivatives] memorized.”

Me: “Sweet! That’s good to hear! Thanks for sharing!”

Student:  ”You rock sir! A true role model indeed! ”

A student I worked with recently ended up passing his college math class. Congrats to him! We started working together a mere two and one-half weeks ago — when he had a low-50s average. Working hard and working diligently, we were able to pull that up to a low-70s. Which grade would have been a little higher if we could have met a few more times to prepare for another quiz and another test he had to take. His effort and success is all the more sterling and solid given that he is having to deal with a hard situation: a family member with cancer. Enough to rack anybody’s mind, heart, and soul. Keep them in your thoughts. They deserve it.

Me: “Where and how often did you hear about logic, deduction, and induction?”

Student I tutor: “Well, never. Logic was never brought up in any fashion in high school. Never. I had a heart attack when my [college] English teacher said it this year. It was a first ever. No one has ever taught me proper thought process…but thanks to you I’m snapping out of it.”