Pre-blog Continued

During my second session at Lakeshore I met my ‘A’ day tutee, Andrew Mcdougle.  He is in the sixth grade and has a twin brother named Phillip who also attends the middle school.  After discussing his interests outside of school I learned that Andrew plays football with his friends and hopes to try out for Lakeshore’s football team in the seventh grade.  He also has an extremely large family with six sisters, four brothers, and countless nieces and nephews.  Andrew’s academic interests lie in math and history.

From the moment Andrew sat down it was clear that he had social tendencies.  While getting to know each other he unofficially introduced me to many of the students in his class and provided personal antidotes for each.  He also informed me of his mischievous behavior at school and home which included suspension for fights and possible plagiarism.  Likewise, it was relayed to me that Andrew currently experiences issues with attendance.  From what he has told me, I would conclude that this is in accordance to his behavior.  Most recently Andrew was suspended for five days as a result of a physical altercation on campus.

When I began helping Andrew with his math homework, it was clear that he had an understanding of the material.  He was able to correctly recite the processes of mean, median, mode, and range and completed five problems I created which required him to utilize the processes for computation.  Thankfully, I was able to provide him assistance with long division.  He seemed to have minor issues when the solution was a decimal, as he couldn’t figure out where to place the decimal point.  However, after explaining and demonstrating to him the operations involved in solving such problems, Andrew was able to emulate the procedures perfectly in three more situations.

Overall, I felt successful in the accomplishments that Andrew and I made during our session.  I was able partially determine his mathematic abilities and plan for our next session.  Furthermore, I’m excited that Andrew is eager to try new things.  Just as our session was ending I asked him if he had any experience with the use of unknown variables while calculating the mean, median, mode, and range of a set of numbers.  His response was “no”, but he wanted to try one before he left.  We were unable to complete this task, but I look forward to introducing him to it next time.