First Day of Spanish Tutoring

Today, I met with Chris to tutor him in Spanish. He had previously told me that he was awful at Spanish, and that there was no way that I could help him. However, when we met, I was amazed at how good he was. I mean, he wasn't perfect, but he definitely was better than I had thought. We reviewed for a quiz that he was having the following day, on verb tenses. It seemed as though he was getting the hang of it pretty well, and I think that I benefited from it as well because it was very good review for me. When I talked to him today, he had told me that the quiz was easy, and that he thought he did good. So I feel pretty accomplished. We also had time to do a worksheet that he was struggling with; I think that this will be a good year for tutoring him, and I think we will both benefit.

More help with Gabe

This morning, I spent about a half hour going over the same LAQ with Gabe. I think he understands it a lot more, because he was able to identify the basics very quickly. We worked mostly on evaluating strengths and weaknesses of the experiment that he chose to do. We also started to outline a different answer to the LAQ, but he decided that he felt more ocmfrtable with the one we had originally been working on. I think that I have seen a lot of improvement with Gabe, because I remember when I first started to help him, he struggled to identify simple basics, and now he is able to go much more in depth, and gain higher marks. I think that he feels a lot more confident in answering questions, because he says what the thinks the asnwer is, rather than hesitating.

Helping Gabe With a Psychology Essay

Today, Gabe came to me and asked for help with psychology, because he wants to re-write his long answer question from the mock exam, so that he can get a better grade. I have helped him write LAQ's (long answer questions) before, and I noticed what his basic problems were. He tended to struggle between the differences in outlining the method of a study, verses the procedure. However, today when I looked at what he wrote for his mock exam, he was able to write down a method... the only problem was, he identified the wrong variables and small things like that (but he still got a method down, instead of a procedure, which was a big plus from when I last helped him.) I helped him to correctly identify the variables of the study he chose, and he was able to explain to me why those were the correct variables. Then, we discussed the most important part of LAQ's- evaluation. He was good at identifying strengths and weaknesses, we just needed to work a bit on how they tied more directly into the study. 

We also briefly went over a short answer question which he was going to re-write today, and he informed me that he got 6 out of 8 marks on it, which is very good. I think I am going to help him more with te LAQ tomorrow though as well.