We reviewed Ben's assignment for class.

As outlined in my email, Ben's assignment included polynomials, which, quite frankly, had me rather taken aback considering his class has not covered quadratics yet. We concentrated on the long division of polynomials, and started trying to understand the concept of the roots of a polynomial. Tough task when there has been no build-up to the topic.

As always, Ben worked so hard, is so eager to understand and always asks the right, relevant questions. It is absolutely not his fault if the questions prove tough to solve, seeing as I don't believe the relevant material has been fully covered in his class (unless there has been a huge mis-match between the assignments Ben has been given and the actual material covered in the classes themselves... which would make no sense).

We reviewed topics for Ben's test. He worked very hard on solving problems I put to him.

We reviewed some test preparation questions from the workbook. Ben worked very hard! All he has to remember is to work through the problems step-by-step, write things out clearly, so he doesn't skip a step and he'll be fine. He understands how to tackle the problems, he just needs to think them through, step-by-step.

We reviewed Ben's assignment for his next math class. The exercises involved identifying vertices in a system of equations, and finding the optimal solution (maximum or minimum) to a particular problem. Ben worked very diligently and hard, and asked the right questions when he was unsure of how to proceed, after which he smoothly solved the problems he tackled.

We worked on Ben's assignment for Friday, which consisted of graphing inequalities to determine where the solutions lie for a set of equations. As usual, Ben worked very diligently in class, and grasped the idea of the problems he needed to solve very quickly.

We worked on Ben's assignment for today that dealt with solving systems algebraically by substitution or elimination. Ben had remembered what I had told him last week about working through the problems step-by-step and writing each step down clearly - by the time we reached the end of the assignment sheet, Ben was whizzing through the problems. I was also very pleased that Ben asked a couple of questions during the lesson, and they were absolutely the right questions to ask, which shows he's thinking through the problems in the right way.

Ben and I worked through the assigned questions in Exercise 3.1. Once Ben understood that the best way to tackle a math problem is to write everything out even if it's already written in the question in the book, he breezed through the exercises. He grasped the concepts of slope and intercept, and successfully determined the solutions of a pair of linear equations.

We were able to get through a lot of the review packet, but not everything. He needs to practice practice practice. There is a good amount of information on this exam, and it will be easy to confuse different equations, so he needs to practice recognizing what is given and what is needed over and over again (and memorize the formulas so he knows them like the back of his hand).

We completed the worksheets that he had to redo for points back. He tends to make little errors when solving equations, with negatives, combining like terms, and which step to take initially.
However, when I tell him to look at the problem once again, he can typically finish it off correctly. He just has to do a little bit more practice, paying attention to the steps that he takes.