Jim

I am an experienced, qualified teacher and tutor with a long record of success helping students overcome specific difficulties in physics and maths and greatly increasing their confidence in these subjects.

I graduated from Cambridge in Physics and Theoretical Physics, then worked in the oil industry as a seismic field engineer and as an instructor officer in the Royal Navy before becoming a teacher in 2002 and Removed tutor since 2013. I recently completed an MSc in Astrophysics at Queen Mary University London.

I like tutoring because of the progress you can see a student make when you can give them your undivided attention and when they are motivated. Of those students who came for help preparing for Summer exams in 2013 for example (and who gave me news of their results), one student moved his grade from a U to a C*, three moved from a U to a D, two more moved from E to B, two from D to A, one from D to B and one from B to A.

*(January module result against resit result or final result as relevant. Unfortunately as there were no January modules in 2014 similar data are not available for that year).

Tutoring Experience

I taught A level for 8 years at a large sixth form college in Winchester and then for a year at a public girls' school nearby. I've also worked over several years with two revision colleges in Oxford. In the last two years I have also been a professional tutor and have worked with over a hundred students from age 9 to university level.

In maths, I tutor many students for OCR MEI A level (Maths and Further Maths, C1-4, FP1-3, S1,2 D1), but also some for OCR, Edexcel and the International Baccalaureate (IB). GCSE and IGCSE have been mostly Edexcel.

In physics, the boards have so far been mainly OCR B and OCR A, AQA A, Edexcel and IB at A level and Edexcel and AQA at GCSE/IGCSE

I help students prepare for the Oxford PAT test and the Physics Olympiad as well as pre-university courses in maths and physics and professional entry tests (for pilot and commercial marine engineering courses). I also tutor students on University courses.

Tutoring Approach

In fact tutoring Maths and tutoring Physics call for rather different approaches, as do tutoring for GCSE and tutoring for A level and University, but in all cases the approach is to work with you (the student) to identify what your needs are in relation to the subject and then to address those.

For some students who may have struggled up till now, a lot of the time the first need is to gain confidence and begin to see that these are subjects that
a) make sense and
b) they can do.

Often this is achieved by being helped to 'see through' the unfamiliar terms used to recognise that what is being talked about is actually something familiar and sometimes even commonplace.

For other, advanced students who have been doing well but want to 'guarantee' an A/A*, it's more often just concise explanations of whatever key ideas have not been clear till now and coaching on giving good exam answers that are needed.

Younger students often need lots of encouragement and help to achieve some early successes in the subject which leads to increased motivation and means students tend to believe more in themselves in the subject, trying harder than they would otherwise do to solve problems (increasing what psychologists call their 'self-efficacy' in the subject).

Applicable in all these cases is the idea that above all these subjects are principally about what you can DO, not what you know and as in learning how to do anything, there's no substitute for being shown how to do it and then doing it a few times for it to start to become easy.

The main point though is that what is appropriate will depend on you and your particular needs.

PACKAGES

The rates quoted in the profile are for single,potentially one-off sessions. If regular tutoring is sought, then I offer the following package:

For A level £500 for a prepaid block of 10 sessions, to be used within 3 months

(If the sessions are not used within the specified time period then the sessions that have been had are reckoned at the single lesson rate and the remaining credit can be refunded in full or carried forward. The same applies if you decide to stop having tutoring at any time.)