Sarah

I am a 19 year old undergraduate, currently studying Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford and have just completed my first year. I have always been highly passionate about maths and having achieved an A* in A level maths in 2023 I am still very familiar with the current Edexcel specification. Furthermore the mathematical demands of my course mean that I have continued to learn new concepts in maths and deepen my own understanding particularly in calculus and statistics throughout the past year. I believe that learning maths is all about strategy and would love to be able to pass on some of the skills I have learnt throughout my education.
I am particularly looking for year 12s who would benefit from consolidating their year 1/ AS maths material before moving into year 13. At the moment I have availability for weekly lessons from 22nd July until 13th September 2024.

Tutoring Experience

Despite being new to tutoring I volunteered at a maths homework help club for GCSE and KS3 students whilst I was doing A levels and so I gained experience in explaining maths and adapting how I approached problems based on different students’ needs.
Having achieved 10 9s at GCSE and 3 A*s in Maths, Physics and German A levels, I have developed skills for problem solving in many contexts during my own school years which I am hoping to be able to make use of.

Tutoring Approach

My approach will be fairly flexible and I am prepared to plan on a lesson by lesson basis. I intend to communicate with the student and/or parent a few days prior to each lesson by email in order to find out what the student would like to get out of the next lesson and I can plan accordingly. I would also suggest that the student initially provides me with a list of all topics they would like to cover within the weeks available so I can start to pencil in a timetable however this will only be suggestions and we can discuss week on week which topics would be best to tackle when. I cannot guarantee covering every topic within AS maths within the 7-8 weekly lessons but you should let me know whether you have generally been understanding most of the course but would like to get some quality revision in of as many topics as possible or if there are particular topics you haven’t understood, in which case we can go at a much slower pace over those to target gaps in understanding.
In general my strategy will consist of:
1. Starting with a question to use as a ‘worked example’ so that I can highlight the key steps involved.
2. Creating a step by step guide of how to answer that style of question (verbally or writing it down depending on the complexity of the topic).
3. Applying these general steps to more questions, ramping up the difficulty.

This will ensure a clear thought process which can be applied to all questions of a certain type. However the harder questions cannot always be answered using rules and memorised steps alone and so extensive exam practice of challenging questions is crucial. If we need to spend longer on the worked example and steps and so don’t have as much time to cover many questions, I may set some questions to be completed as homework which I will be happy to mark.

I tutor online only using Zoom/Microsoft teams depending on which the student is more comfortable using. I will also make use of a shared whiteboard and it would be helpful if the student had access to a tablet with a stylus so they can also write on the whiteboard however this is not essential.