Miki's Math Progress

On Tuesday, Miki's tutoring session was divided in half - I tutored her mother for the first half and then Miki for the remaining time. Both were enjoyable but also frustrating.

Her mother had homework from her adult ESL class. She had a list of weather-related idioms (under the weather, any port in a storm, etc) and had to use them to complete sentences. It was difficult to explain the meaning of the idioms in Japanese, a difficulty that was compounded by her constantly interrupting my examples. In any case, though, tutoring her was fun because she's working hard and she has a good sense of humor.

Then I worked with Miki on a math lesson I'd made. It was intended to be easy, but she made several mistakes. Why is she unable to add and subtract negative numbers? Something about negative numbers really confuses her.

Up until now, I was under the mistaken belief that some practice would clear it up for her. I'm trying a different approach now in which I reteach the methods as if she was learning them for the first time. I actually had to check out a book from the library for this because I wasn't sure how to teach adding say, -7 + 3. It's always seemed pretty natural to me.

Thankfully, this approach seems to have helped. When I tutored her Thursday, I gave her about fifteen short math problems at the end of the lesson, and she got all but one correct! Before, she probably would have gotten only half correct. I guess all she needed was to be retaught the material and to learn to slow down and be careful. We're still working on that last one, though!