Math Help

Mathematics is a complex subject with a long history. Maybe you love it, or maybe it is not your thing. No matter how you feel about it, you probably find math to be quite challenging, as you push the boundary of your own knowledge further and further out. Perhaps you are (or perhaps your child or student is) just encountering the discipline of mathematics for the first time, or maybe you are in an advanced calculus class in college or graduate school; no matter where you are in your own particular course of study, math can both reward and frustrate. Whether you need top Math tutors in Boston, Math tutors in Detroit, or top Math tutors in Dallas Fort Worth, working with a pro may take your studies to the next level.

Math is rather linear in its progression toward mastery, moving inexorably from one concept to the next, persistently building upon a student’s past learning and experience. This is a strength for mathematics, but it is also a weakness: miss a week, or even a day, of instruction and suddenly you may find yourself at sea, lost among new structures and ideas, even while others, present when the foundations were laid, seem not to struggle. Varsity Tutors offers resources like free Math Practice Tests to help with your self-paced study, or you may want to consider a Math tutor.

And what a whirlwind of ideas math is: starting with the simplest notions of grouping and counting, students move on to the basics of arithmetic operations: addition; subtraction; multiplication; and division. More complex mathematical concepts follow, and before long students find themselves working with exponents and compound fractions, decimals and variables. Where are you in your course of study? What do you find most challenging?

Are you trying to understand absolute value or whether a particular decimal is larger than a given fraction? Maybe you’re doing plane geometry, trying for the first time to calculate the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle from two of its sides, or perhaps you’re involved with algebraic functions, like F(x). Speaking of functions, are you doing coordinate geometry? How do you graph a function? How do you graph a logarithm? What about two-step inequalities? Then there’s a whole bit about parallel lines, midpoint and distance formulas, tangent lines, perpendicular lines, intercepts, curves . . . how do you find the endpoints of a line segment anyway?

Maybe you are a more advanced high school (or even college) student, taking a course in Algebra II, Trigonometry, or Calculus. What are box and whisker plots for? How do you use them to represent data? Do you need to graph a parabola or figure out circular inequalities? Are you interested in finding the LaGrange error while understanding Taylor’s Theorem? Maybe you just need a refresher on sine, cosine, and secant. In addition to the Math Help section and Math tutoring, you may also want to consider taking some of our Math Flashcards.

Wherever you are in your pursuit of mathematical knowledge, whether you’re doing statistics for a research methods class in the social sciences or just trying to figure out the volume of a sphere, know that every bridge you’ve been on, and every jet you see flying in the sky, and every investment made or item purchased is made possible because of math. The electronic device you read these words on is an instrument of math.

If you are struggling, need a refresher, or just want a new challenge, Varsity Tutors has a huge variety of free study materials on its Learning Tools site. You can take a quiz to brush up on your skills, answer a random question from a flashcard to keep yourself sharp, or engage in a full-length diagnostic test of forty to sixty questions in order to find out where you are truly strong and weak. Get a better idea of your own strengths and weaknesses today with the help of Learning Tools’ free math resources.