Dr. Held's Math Tutoring & SAT Prep

10/02/2016

I am excited to announce that I'm now available for online tutoring via Wyzant, so I can help students anywhere in the world. Additionally, to help me establish my new online profile, I am offering a steep permanent discount to the first 10 students who sign up via this link.

Nothing is more important to me than students finding their perfect tutor. Take a lesson with me or get a free lesson with another tutor on Wyzant.

09/14/2016

Funny how math works, generally completely cumulative. In other words, many topics build on themselves so that success or mastery in a topic gives a higher probability of success in following topics. Naturally, the opposite is true as well. Additionally, many topics in math overlap or there are intricate relationships. Noticing how topics relate to each other is critical. Many students struggle in math simply because them cannot fundamentally see such relationships, or they never master underlying but important skills. I can help build the important skills or explain relationships, patterns, and misunderstood principles.

06/15/2016

Does your child have difficulty with math? Exactly what is happening in your child's math classroom? How competent or engaging is the teacher? We often take for granted that a "certified" teacher must also by default also be a "competent" teacher. This is, of course, not necessarily so. Several university professors of math (Silver, Mesa, Morris, Atar, and Benken) did an analysis of lessons submitted by teachers hoping to become "nationally board certified", an arduous year-long process. They concluded that in portfolios submitted for this purpose many lessons purported to be "best practices" were consistently not intellectually challenging and rarely demanded that students provide explanations or mathematical reasoning. We should be moving away from rote and lifeless worksheets into application, discovery, analysis, and relationships.

06/03/2016

Calvin and Hobbs were my all time favorites. Happy Friday everyone.

05/27/2016

Fractions are hard. Happy Friday!

05/23/2016

If you follow my page you'll see some insight and perspective relating to math education issues. Some will be general thoughts, others helpful ideas to parents, and some actual research findings. Today, let me say that if you show me a high school math failure or one with a dismal math record, I'll show you a kid who did a poor job with math in middle school. The goal is success in high school math, which will be faster-paced, more rigorous, and fully dependent upon mastery of middle school skills. Serious middle school math deficiencies will correlate to disastrous high school results. My advice to parents is simple - do whatever it takes to help your child do at least an average, if not better, job in middle school math. This will save my heartache and pain later and pay its own dividends.

05/20/2016

Happy Friday everyone.

05/13/2016

It's true that teaching has put me on blood pressure meds, but after 30 years I still love it.

05/06/2016

My students think my math jokes are juvenile. They're probably right, but what do you think?

04/29/2016

Happy Friday! Enjoy this math joke of the week.

04/17/2016

"Deliberate, productive struggle with mathematical ideas refers to the fact that when students exert effort with important mathematical ideas, even if this struggle initially involves confusion and errors, the end result is greater learning. This has been shown to be true whether the struggle is due to challenging, well-implemented teaching, or due to faulty teaching the students must struggle to make sense of."

In contemporary education, mathematics education is the practice of teaching and learning mathematics, along with the associated scholarly research.