Peak Thoughts: A Blog

Getting Ready for Pre-Calculus: A Guide for Parents and Students

Getting Ready for Pre-Calculus: A Guide for Parents and Students

As your high school student gears up for pre-calculus, you might be wondering how to best prepare them for this crucial class. Pre-calculus is a significant stepping stone that lays the groundwork for more advanced math courses like calculus. It’s an essential course, especially for students planning to pursue STEM fields in college. At Peak Tutoring, we’re here to help make this journey a smooth one. Here’s a friendly guide to getting your student ready for pre-calculus. 1. Why Pre-Calculus…

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Navigating College Applications: A Guide for Rising Seniors and Their Parents

Navigating College Applications: A Guide for Rising Seniors and Their Parents

An Exciting Time for High School Seniors is Right Around the Corner! As the summer winds down and the final year of high school approaches, rising seniors and their parents face a crucial period: the college application season. This time is both exciting and challenging, filled with important tasks and deadlines. To help you stay organized and on track, Peak Tutoring offers comprehensive college counseling services, including SAT/ACT preparation, college selection guidance, application assistance, and scholarship application support. Here’s an…

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Is Your Child Interested in Dinosaurs? Two Great TV Productions Should Not Be Missed.

Is Your Child Interested in Dinosaurs? Two Great TV Productions Should Not Be Missed.

I loved dinosaurs as a child, as so many kids do, and I’ve maintained my interest in those amazing animals even as an adult. This may not be too surprising, considering my background as a science educator. But it’s not unusual for kids – even teenagers – to continue to find the mysteries of the Mesozoic beasts who dominated this planet for hundreds of millions of years to be quite interesting. Paleontology has experienced a golden age of discovery during…

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Is Your Child Taking AP U.S. History Next School Year?

Is Your Child Taking AP U.S. History Next School Year?

For many high school students, Advanced Placement United States History is often the first class that asks them to argue. You read that correctly. In AP U.S. History, teachers work with students to learn the context of major events in the nation’s history. So, yes, there is detail to be mastered. But equally important are the skills emphasized by the College Board so that students are prepared to succeed on the AP U.S. History exam. Students should be prepared, by…

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Algebra, Here We Come!

Algebra, Here We Come!

If your student will enter eighth or ninth grade in the autumn, then it’s likely she will be enrolled in Algebra I in one of those grades or the other. Often students first encountering algebra find themselves abruptly thrown off stride by the change from a focus on numbers and arithmetic operations to relationships between quantities. Here’s a typical problem of the sort your student will likely see, along with an answer and explanation. This might help to provide a…

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First Webb Telescope Images Coming in July

First Webb Telescope Images Coming in July

NASA announced Wednesday that the first photographs from the James Webb Space Telescope are expected to be released on July 12. Testing of the observatory has been underway since it arrived at one of the Sun-Earth system’s LaGrange points on January 24. “Our goals for Webb’s first images and data are both to showcase the telescope’s powerful instruments and to preview the science mission to come,” Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer and Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute…

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Navigating the Elements Map

Navigating the Elements Map

One of the subjects that can perplex high school chemistry students is periodic trends. This is the part of the course where you learn how to read the Periodic Table of the Elements. You know, the map that tells us about all the kinds of atoms in the universe. Now, you might say “I don’t like to read maps and, besides, who needs to do it when we’ve got smartphones?” But I’m here to tell you that learning this skill…

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A Typical First Semester Physics Problem

A Typical First Semester Physics Problem

As high school students move into their physics courses, especially in AP Physics 1, they’re going to encounter problems involving the study of kinematics, or one-dimensional motion. One of the typical kinds of problems that an instructor may ask students to solve involves acceleration and the application of Newton’s Laws of Motion. Here’s an example. A 43.0 kg parachutist is moving straight downward with a speed of 4.00 meters per second. If the parachutist comes to rest after constantly accelerating…

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A Student’s Stoichiometry Story Doesn’t Have to be Sad

A Student’s Stoichiometry Story Doesn’t Have to be Sad

For many chemistry students, solving stoichiometry problems is a headache. But it does not have to be that way. In this post, I’m going to show you a simple way to make your stoichiometry story a sunny one. What we are usually doing with these types of problems is converting some quantity of a substance, usually expressed in grams, to a different unit called a mole. Then we often go from the number of moles of that first substance to…

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