I asked a kid if he needed help and he said no. On that day, Ms. Hubbard was subbing for Mr. Muro. Ms. Hubbard is generally more assertive than Mr. Muro, so she told me to help that kid anyways because he probably did actually need help. She was right. I helped him with adding and subtracting polynomials as well as multiplying and dividing them. Later another kid came over to work at the same table as us. I think it’s because he thought he could get out of work to talk to his friend. Ms. Hubbard asked him to do his homework, to which he replied that he had already done it. Ms. Hubbard then gave him a polynomials worksheet that he didn’t seem to need much help with. Meanwhile I was still helping the kid that said he ‘’didn’t need help’’. He didn’t actually know how to do much except for finding out if an expression was a monomial, binomial, trinomial, or polynomial. I had to explain to him that the degree of a polynomial is how many variables there are. For example if there is an expression such as: 2x^5+3n^2 y^4 , the degree would be 11. Once the second guy finished his worksheet, I checked it for him. He gave me the idea that he would have used the answer key to answer all the questions if he had seen it there. He wouldn’t have needed to anyways, as he got all his answers right. I found out that he didn’t do 2 thirds of the bottom page, so I asked him to do that as well. I watched him carefully to see that he wasn’t cheating. It seemed like he didn’t cheat because all of his work was there and 2 of the answers he returned to me were wrong. This has been my most eventful tutoring session to date.

Alerik