We spent most of the session on a problem drill in which I described pairs or sets of angles (complementary, supplementary, vertical and congruent) and Will sketched the angles.

Will and I completed a comprehensive review of the first 3 sections of the chapter on the Renaissance and Reformation to prepare for his test tomorrow. Topics included the Renaisssance in Italy and its movement north, the Golden Age of the Arts, Renaissance artists, writers, humanists, printing revolution, and the rise of Protestantism.

We solved a few algebra equations listing the sets and their reasons. Then we proved the Symmetric Property of Congruence from scratch and fished with a partly completed proof in which we filled in the blanks.

We began the session by introducing Will to a "word problem" in which, in this case, we changed the word "BAIT" to the word "FISH" one letter at a time, with each new word needing to be a valid English word. This introduced the rigid and incremental that must be used in the two-column proof in plane geometry.

Today Will reviewed the 250 year time span of the Scientific Revolution. We discussed the advances in physics, mathematics, astronomy, anatomy and chemistry during this period. We also noted the important researchers and thinkers during this time who worked throughout Europe.

Act 1, scene 2

We started getting into the meat of the play with the Act. 1, scene 2. I'm very pleased with Will's attention and effort thus far. He's really trying with the reading and did much better with the language today.

I administered the test. We used the remaining 20 minutes of the session to introduce elementary logic: the conditional statements, its converse, inverse and contrapositive. We finished up with biconditionals.

We went over the Chapter 1 Review in the text at the white board together.

read/Discuss Hamlet

We started getting into Hamlet for real today, and i was very pleased with Will's effort. The language is difficult for him (as it is for everyone when the start), but we're going through it very meticulously and I'm confident it will get easier for him as we go along. But he was an active participant in the reading and the discussion. I'm really looking forward to working on this play with him.

Discuss Man with Enormous Wings
choose next material

Today was Will's fist day in person, so we took a bit of time to talk and get to know each other. We then discussed the short story I had him read since our last session, and I was very pleased with how well he understood and had thought about the story. He had a lot of insight about the nature of people and religion, and it ended up being a very interesting conversation. We then talked about what we're going to do next, and I gave him multiple options to choose from. After discussing each, he chose to read Hamlet! In the second session we started reading the play.