New School Year = More Flash Cards

I've got a "new" Grade 11 student starting this week (meaning a student I wasn't tutoring last year) and so I spent some time recently coming up with a list of Grade 10 review topics to go over with her before launching into Grade 11 Functions. My rationale in doing so is that there's really no point building a new house on a shaky foundation, so it's better to find out what she already knows before adding anything to it.

I realized as I was reading over the Grade 10 list this afternoon that most of it already exists in homemade flash card form because I had two Grade 11's last year and had reviewed at least some of the earlier concepts with them. This is one of those examples where my anal retentive personality comes in handy: I tend to plan ahead and spend time creating materials that I can reuse later, rather than doing everything as a one-off. To show what I mean, some of the flash cards that I use with my students were actually created for Tammy, back in the 1990s! It helps when you hardly ever throw anything out, I guess...

So tonight I added another dozen or so cards to the mix, and more clearly separated my "high school" pile of flash cards into Grade 9, Grade 10 and Grade 11 sections. Since there's a lot of overlap between the first two high school Math courses, I'll probably start with Grade 9 when my new student arrives, work our way through the Grade 10 cards, and then begin covering the Functions topics (that she doesn't have in school until 2nd semester, aka February next year). I also arranged each stack to represent a logical progression through each course, which should allow me to more quickly identify any weak areas she has. This is a student enrolled in the University level Grade 11 Functions (typically I get kids in the College or, at best, College/Univ Mixed course) so I suspect I'll find that she knows most of what she's supposed to. If so, that means we'll spend the majority of the next 5 months going over the upcoming course curriculum, which means that I'll actually get to teach it to her. That's a thrilling prospect for me, Math geek that I am!