I'm Working!

Sorry for the lack of posts in recent days. I hold myself responsible for any boredom. Although, you should find a hobby or something if you depend on me for entertainment. With that said, I do love to provide an outlet for work-related boredom and boredom in general. I added Devin as an author for a couple of reasons:

1. I want to hear what he has to say. I get bored myself and reading his thoughts alleviates that.
2. More posts for you to read. Not just more quantity, but more quality too. I like to think that the diversity that Devin brings to the blog will give it new life. I enjoy the pictures and accurate graphs in his posts.

Anyway, back to the subject of this post. I just finished with 3 hours of online tutoring with tutor.com. I received an email this afternoon informing me that I passed the final exam and the background check. I decided to get started as soon as possible so I signed up for 3 hours from 7-10 pm. It went really well. I helped several students with their algebra homework. We did some proportions, linear equations, a little graphing, and an absolute value inequality. I haven't done much algebra since 8th and 9th grade, so I was pretty worried I wouldn't be able to help. It worked out though. The questions I got weren't too hard, and everything felt like it was coming back to me pretty quickly. You should see my workspace. I have my textbooks from high school spread out on my desk as references. I still have a bunch (90% at least) of my homeworks still wedged in my 8th grade Algebra textbook. I used to have really neat handwriting and I used a ruler a lot. I'm tutoring online again tomorrow for an hour and then tutoring the family friend that night right after online work. I definitely prefer to tutor in person, though. It can be difficult to convey things online that would be very simple in person. I really like to show things visually, so I like making little diagrams to show how things work, etc. The tutor.com interface sort of allows me to do that, but it's not as simple as leaning over with a pencil. Tutoring seems less efficient. I worked with a student on comparing graphs for almost an hour, a question that would've taken 10 minutes tops in person. There was a little bit of a set back though because the student didn't really know functions and what the graph would look like. f[x] = x is the most simple graph and function there is, but the student was not familiar with it. I probably could've explained that function much faster in person. That particular problem was a little frustrating. I could've told the student that h[x] = 6 + x move 6 units up compared to f[x] = x, but I wanted to make sure the student knew what the simple f[x] = x is. Sometimes I come to a point in the work where I know that giving an answer would wrap things up very quickly, but I always choose to trudge through it. Sometimes when I do this, I can sense the frustration of the student escalating. I had a student that left the session with me because I wasn't moving fast enough, I guess. I just didn't want to give answers; that's not how tutoring works. Am I right? Holla.