At the end of June, the Marin
County Department of Health gave me permission to resume tutoring as long as I
do it in outside with masks and distance. At that time, I started working with
a new high school student to help him with his writing. I also started working
with two adult caregivers, one from Zimbabwe and the other one from Haiti. I am
helping them study to take the GED. Now that the fall semester has started, I
am also working with 4 middle school students and one high school student.
With the nearby fires, working
outside in the smoke has been worrisome. I almost cancelled some appointments.
I have been using the website https://www.purpleair.com/
to see what the air quality is like at different locations. Fortunately, each
day, at each time and location, the smoke was not too bad for us and we were
able to have good sessions.
I am very happy working with all of
my students. For me, as a Sir Francis Drake High School graduate, the most
interesting thing that I did this week was help a student research and write an
essay on Sir Francis Drake. The most exciting thing for me this week has been
teaching math to a sixth grader whose school is not offering a math class to
him this semester. One of my other students is in the same predicament. The
schools have decided to teach half of the subjects this semester and the other
half next semester. I believe that it is a mistake to not have math every
semester. I believe it is the same for foreign language studies. Perhaps for
other subjects, the every other semester approach is ok. The exciting thing has
been discovering how smart at math the sixth grader that I am working with is.
Since, he did not have any homework yet. I spent my two sessions with him on
Science and math. For science, we have been learning about wildfires For math, I quickly
checked his multiplication. He seemed to have his times tables memorized. So we
went on to fractions. He needed a little bit of help and quickly was able to
add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions. Since he was doing well with the
fractions, I taught him how to solve simple equations with one variable. He
mastered them quickly, so I added a second variable and gave its value. At the
end of our first session, I felt I could teach him all of middle school math in
one year, depending upon how much time we have after completing weekly homework
assignments. In our second session, we reviewed fractions and the
variable equations that I taught him on Monday. Then I taught him how to find
the area of a triangle. We read a little bit about Pythagoras and I taught him
the Pythagorean Theorem. He was able to use the theorem!
My schedule is almost full; I do still have time
to help a few more students. If you know anyone that I can help at this time,
please have them contact me. You can also tell them to visit my website www.marinhomeworkcoach.com
Thanks,
Chris