"I enjoy working with students who want to learn. I am a retired California public high school math and science teacher. I have a single subject California teaching credential in math, physics, chemistry, geoscience (earth science), and biological sciences (biology).

I taught algebra as a high school math teacher, as well as nanotechnology along with chemistry in my high school science classes. Recently I was an adjunct college professor teaching algebra-based physics and labs at a private university.

I encourage my students to visualize new concepts to help them learn to picture things by encouraging the use of drawings and illustrations, and hands-on lab activities, often using very simple materials especially in geometry and science.

In math we build a solid foundation on basic principles, such as knowing the multiplication table, how to deal with negative numbers, adding fractions with different denominators, rules for exponents and logarithms, applying Pythagorean's Theorem, using completing the square to factor and to graph quadratic equations, and proving almost all the trig values every 15 degrees on the unit circle. This will take us all the way from arithmetic to precalculus.

In science we are learning new words and new concepts, and we need to understand those new vocabulary terms to be able to visualize new science concepts, such as dimensional units, dimensional analysis, and density, et.al..

Learning how to decode problems, list what we know and what we're trying to find, then inserting conversion factors is how we solve all math and science problems.

To Find - - - - Equal - - - - Given - - - - Conversion factors

This is reiterated in Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War': "The winning army realizes the conditions for victory first, then fights. The losing army fights first, then seeks victory." less...