This tutoring session with PJ went
very well. He has definitely opened up with me a lot more. He is actually a
little more excited about his tutoring sessions with me. This session he was
beyond productive and he even taught me a few things I had forgotten back from
my days of elementary school mathematics. He was pretty happy he could explain
the distributive and commutative property to me.
One of PJ’s
common errors is to blindly multiply and divide certain numbers in problems
without fully reading it. This is extremely common and I do this too even in my
engineering classes. So one thing I’ve been repeating to him is basically that
he must fully read the problem and not to start any operations without having
fully understood it first.
We do
this by putting our pencils down while reading. Then once it’s done, I make him
explain to me who the subject is of the problem. Next, I ask him what is the
subject doing. Then my next series of questions are about the numbers and what
they mean. The final question I ask him is what is the problem asking for and
by that time it usually clicks what errors he committed. One brilliant thing
about PJ is that his mind jumps immediately to solve the problem and when you
see him in action, it’s amazing how he can do most of the work in his head
effortlessly. Unfortunately, because he’s in such a rush to get the answer, he
ends up dividing a number that wasn’t part of the problem or he ends up guessing
correctly because he is used to the textbook’s manner of multiple choice.
I’m
excited to see how he does next week on his homework using this methodology to
word problems.
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