Amelia Z

Your learner asked lots of good questions throughout, and it definitely seemed like he came away from the session with a better understanding not just of how to work with ellipses, but why ellipses work the way they do. Answering that "why" can be very difficult (and frustrating) as a teacher, but you did a good job of it. I know that this was a long session, but if you get a chance in the future, I might try to add in one or two problems at the end, just to give your learner a chance to get more firsthand practice with the material.

Tutor · 1 yr. ago

The slideshow was very informative and was a great way to present the information to the learners. Since there is typically a lot of information on the slide, I would recommend annotating directly on the slide (such as circling, highlighting, or underlining what you are discussing at the moment). An example would be on the "Equations of lines" slide (slide 11). You did this for the inequalities and quadratics part of the slideshow, but this would also help to supplement other slides as well. Your explanations are also very extensive and in-depth, so great job! Especially when it comes to practice questions, you did a great job walking through your thought process for learners. For example, when you said, "So if this is greater than 0, this equation doesn't have 2 distinct real roots, right? Because this is...real. And it's gonna be plus or minus something real." This explanation was concise but it was a great way to present it to learners where you were talking about no, 1, or 2 solutions. For practice questions, such as the slide on "absolute value", I would recommend to put practice questions on a different slide to provide more space for showing work.

Tutor · 1 yr. ago

You certainly demonstrated a comprehensive grasp of the material - all of your definitions were clear and accurate. Additionally: good job writing out words for your learner; that's a really crucial part sometimes, especially when the learner isn't as familiar with English. Your learner seemed to struggle with the idea of an ellipse being defined by its foci. I know that this is one of the trickier concepts to explain (the idea that the sum of the two distances can be a constant seems a little bizarre at first). One strategy which I've known can really help people is explaining the concept of an ellipse with a string tied between two nails: you can move the string out to an infinite set of points (forming an ellipse), but the length of the string never changes. Sometimes just having a visual representation like this can help! Good job being persistent in explaining the eccentricity; you did well in giving multiple explanations, until one finally clicked.

Tutor · 1 yr. ago

Hey Amelia! You did a fantastic job handling both the shared screen for questions and your video for handwritten solutions. I really appreciate how you carefully explained each and every topic, no matter how small - whether it was the expression inside the square root not being negative, explaining the range properly, or using Desmos to illustrate the behavior of functions near zero. You thoroughly explained each step of your solution, which is incredibly valuable for the learners to deeply understand the problem-solving process. Well done!

Tutor · 1 yr. ago