Tag: private tuition

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Bad A-level maths results?

If you failed to achieve the mathematics results you were hoping for, getting bad exam results, all is not lost. Taking a year out can be a good move. There are a number of reasons why students fail to achieve the exam grades they were hoping for. Make time to reflect on where things went wrong. There will be many things that you did right of course, but somehow it didn’t come together. Many people do not perform well under stress and focussing on one subject instead of three for an extended period of time will allow you to assess your strengths and weaknesses and recoup.

When we are young, a year seems like a long time but patience is a virtue and needs to be cultivated these days when everyone expects to be able to get immediate satisfaction. Self-reflection and circumspection are all qualities which are sought by employers.

Download a copy of the syllabus and highlight topics that you are less sure about. Be honest. Then highlight those topics you have some idea about and those you are confident at. Now print out a copy of the formula booklet for your syllabus and have this to hand when you practise.

Do you learn better by watching videos of questions being worked through? If that is the case, then there are some websites with videos of questions by topic for you to browse through and watch. www.examsolutions.net is one such website.

When you are ready to try your hand at some exam questions, you can find many places online where they are sorted by topic or where you can download entire past papers. Of course, with the new maths syllabus, you do have to resort to ‘legacy’ questions once you have exhausted the available ‘new’ material. But as you become familiar with the syllabus, you will be come expert at picking through ‘legacy’ papers and identifying which questions are relevant and which are not.

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Online tuition

More and more tutors are providing online tuition these days. I use a digital pen and an interactive whiteboard. Notes that I write are displayed on a shared screen and the student can also interact via this learning space. Documents in jpeg or pdf format may easily be uploaded. All that is needed is a stable internet connection at both ends. There are so many resources on the internet to enhance any lesson. I give about 50% of my lessons online and it is very convenient. Lesson notes may be retrieved at any time.

One factor in choosing online tuition is the lack of availability of good local tutors, if the student lives in a remote area or if you simply want convenience.

I currently tutor students regularly in the UK and overseas. I believe that it is going to be the future of learning. There are even schemes to introduce online teaching to poorer families by teaching several students at once. The cost is then shared equally, allowing parents who could never afford private tuition to be able to do so. Just imagine if a scheme could be rolled out like this in the developing world. Five or so poor kids from a South African township meet up at their local church or community centre and log on to computers or even just mobile devices. They have an interactive learning experience with a teacher in the UK and it costs them almost nothing because the relatively low cost per student is subsidised by the organisation they are meeting at.