Are you looking for a top-tier Palos Verdes algebra tutor?  If you are, you’ve come to the right place. The following article will give both students and parents a firsthand breakdown, top to bottom, regarding the important elements that a Palos Verdes algebra tutor will need in order to equip students.

First of all, we need to have our basics down. It’s a lot less painful to practice math when we aren’t stumbling over the little steps that are present in every topic. We’re talking about order of operations (PEMDAS)—mastering it to understand how to simplify expressions and manipulate equations with confidence—as well as how positive and negative numbers interact under different situations. This second area—knowing how negative numbers add and multiply— provides a necessary foundation for mental math and logic.

The struggles that, we, as a collective Palos Verdes algebra tutor see most commonly with algebra students arise when adding/subtracting integers (as well as multiplying/dividing them), combining terms, and factoring goes awry. These struggles happen all across the student spectrum: we see them in students who are struggling in their classes, and with students who are doing amazingly well. If math is difficult for you, I really recommend you call Study Hut Tutoring, just down the hill in the Redondo Riviera to pair up with a top tier Palos Verdes algebra tutor.  Take time to go over the basics as you encounter them again in your current material and repair those long-forgotten errors. Review whenever you feel yourself struggling with anything you have done in the past; the more recently you originally learned it, the easier it will be cement it. If you’re a student who does well in math, make sure to be careful with the small things: as you move on from one step to the next, be cautious of small mistakes.

Most of the issues that algebra students tend to have, though, stem from a larger mistake: not showing all of their work. Forgot to add a like term or distribute a negative somewhere? Neglecting to properly write out each step was likely a cause. Made a calculation error somewhere along the line? Locating the mistake is going to be a lot easier if you’ve shown all your work. The reasons that students refrain from showing certain steps vary, as do the errors that tend to plague them as a result of it. But whether it stems from students’ overconfidence in their abilities with mental math or simply a lack of diligence in writing everything out, the result is always the same: red marks on tests and quizzes that could likely have been avoided had all of the work just been written out.