Whew...

So I signed up for a tutoring opportunity through our stake. It is called Books and Basketball. Students from 3rd - 12th grades are assigned to tutors (members of the singles wards) to help them with their homework one night a week. We do homework for an hour and then the kids can play basketball or games for 30 minutes. It is a great program and a lot of fun. The kids are great and I love this type of service.

Anyway, I was paired up with a senior in high school. She is a great girl and SUPER smart. She is trilingual and in all Honors/AP classes. For the past few times we met she has needed help with her topics class. Now what is topics you may ask. Let me tell you... it is algebraic concepts, paired with some trigonometry, lots of statistics/probability, and some calculator programming. Is it over your head yet? Because it is for sure over mine. Secretly, I am wondering how come I didn't get paired up with a 3rd grader. That seems to be more of my speed lately.

So for last night's homework, we needed to write a program for a graphing calculator that would help determine the probability of random coin tosses. I was actually pretty impressed with both of our abilities. We were able to do most of the steps until we came to the final step. We needed to program this statement "If N< LblQ ...". To be honest, this was the easiest step of the problem. Except for we couldn't find the < than sign on the calculator. After we both searched for several minutes through all sorts of menus I decided to call on other fellow tutors to help me out with this. Matt, an engineer for Raytheon (rocket sciences and such) was of no help. Thankfully Abby who is somehow involved with statistics found it. (But don't worry in the meantime we found someone with a Blackberry and assigned them to Google how to find the sign.) Whew... found it and typed the command in and finally we were able to run the problem set.

Take home from last night:

1. I am so thankful for my awesome memory so that I could remember how to work a graphing calculator. (I haven't used on one since Pre-Calc in 11th grade.)
2. I am thankful for my critical thinking skills I have developed through many years of schooling and challenging work environments.
3. I am thankful for having had experience in some programming and working with computers.
4. I don't know how I will ever be able to help my kids with their homework... I feel for Mom's out there.
5. I am sooooo GLAD I am done with school!