Tutoring For All Ages

Abacus has been helping students learn to love learning since 2001. Whether you're looking for general subject tutoring, standardized test prep, or both, look no further.

Below you will find news updates as well as articles on test preparation and general study tips. To the right, browse our offerings and other information, like our two Word of the Day feeds.

And if you have any questions, please feel free to use the page at right to contact us.

Interview fashion is one of the most frequently-asked questions I get as a tutor of both college and prep school hopefuls. I’m not sure whether it’s because many of my students are used to worrying about clothing choices or because they just want every detail of the admissions process to be perfect, but I get so many questions about the interview that it seems prudent to write down a few answers here.

Silly fashion shows aside, my advice about interview attire is very simple: be yourself, and show respect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every year I work with science and math students who come to me thinking they just need help learning the material, without realizing that their main problem is that they don’t know how to study. They’re generally very good students who make the common mistake of assuming that the methods that work for them in history and literature classes will work for them in chemistry or geometry. In fact, these are such different classes that the same study habits rarely work for both.

So if you’re taking your first hard math class, or your first physical science class, here are some tips to help you study more efficiently:

• Know when to stop memorizing. Every subject in school involves some amount of memorizing. Sometimes you have to spend hours a night drilling dates and names into your head, and sometimes you just have to memorize the Central Limit Theorem. Memorization is a skill that will serve you all your life in some capacity or another, so don’t neglect it.

  However, another important skill you need to learn is when to put down the flash cards and pick up a pencil and some scratch paper. In math and the hard sciences especially, there is just no substitute for practice problems. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was in college, I was introduced to the 90-minute lecture. From my perspective as a student, any single lecture started out as usual, with me taking notes and thinking about the material in equal measures. But, by the end of the lecture, it was a struggle just to pay enough attention to take useful notes (which I hoped I’d be able to understand later).

Unless, that is, the professor was kind enough to give us a break in the middle of class. That made all the difference: I retained far more information from and did better in those classes. It was in those classes that I really experienced the importance of taking breaks.

One of my professors justified the break schedule by explaining that the human attention span was 45 minutes. (These days it seems like it’s much shorter.) That made us all feel better. It wasn’t our fault that we couldn’t stay focused — it was a physiological response, built into our brains.

Given that an adolescent brain has a hard time paying attention to anything for even 20 or 30 minutes straight, it seems silly that so many tests are so much longer than that. The SAT breaks its test up into sections no more than 25 minutes long, but even that is too long for a lot of students at that age (and that’s completely normal). And, what about other tests? How do you combat mental fatigue when you’re on the hour-long ACT math section, or when you’re taking an in-class final exam?

Simple: take your own breaks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Having just written an article discussing skipping strategies in terms of how different standardized tests are curved, it seems like a good time to go into more detail on a generalized strategy for skipping vs. guessing.

First things first: it’s important to note the difference between a wrong-answer penalty and a guessing penalty. Most students (and many tutors) use them interchangeably, but I think of them as being somewhat different.

The wrong-answer penalty is the penalty that a test assesses for each wrong answer you submit. The guessing penalty is the overall amount by which your score will drop if you employ a random-guessing strategy on the whole test.

Most tests that do have a wrong-answer penalty don’t have a guessing penalty. The test-makers arrange the wrong-answer penalty so that randomly guessing on the test will neither help you nor hurt you.

Here’s an illustration of what I mean (note that I’ve also discussed this on the Abacus podcast): Read the rest of this entry »

A few of you clever online-only students have noticed that the tagline of this website has recently changed its location, from Connecticut to California. That’s because Brooke, the founder of Abacus Learning, is finishing up her PhD and is moving to California. She’ll be maintaining this website and continuing to tutor students, but from a different location.

Additionally, she, make that I, will henceforth be switching narrative perspectives. I’ve always written in a very general style, using “we” and “our” wherever necessary to make the point that the experiences summed up in these articles aren’t just my own. But that grows more cumbersome with each article, so from now on I will write from my own point of view and give credit to other tutors where necessary.

If you are in Connecticut and are searching for a tutor, don’t click away — please feel free to contact me through this website. Many of the tutors I’ve worked with over the years are still in the New Haven area, and I would be happy to hear about your student and put you in touch with whoever is best-suited to your situation. And if you’re in California, you’re in luck!

To all the students and families I’ve worked with over the years, I will miss you! And if you ever decide to move to “SoCal,” drop me a line!

–Brooke