As a dedicated teacher, I enjoy teaching at all levels of ability, tailoring my approach to the needs of my tutees. Having a calm and patient manner I enjoy the challenge of helping tutees to understand basic principles in ways that make sense to them. Whether you need help with a specific problem or an explanation of a more general concept I’m here to help. Just let me know what you need assistance with and I’ll do my best to provide a clear and helpful response.
Elements of my approach:
- review of basic maths
- practice of routine processes and methods
- discussion of how to approach A/B questions at Higher/A-level
- breaking down complicated maths to simpler ideas
- problem-solving techniques
- encouraging you to have a questioning attitude in your study of maths
- exam technique
Our aim is to work towards creating a time and space where you can talk about and learn maths in a natural way. I contend that the big difference between private tuition and, say, watching tutor videos online, or learning by some other online or electronic means, is that a tutor can listen to you and detect things that are misunderstood and provide instant and friendly feedback to correct these misundertandings. I put it this way “You won’t learn maths by listening to me [or any other tutor for that matter] but you may learn maths if I listen to you.” Neither, of course, can you interrupt a video to ask a pressing question that has just occured to you, but you can with a tutor. Any good tutor wants you to ask your question and to be engaged.
I ask my tutees to aim high and to that end the focus will always be on you developing as a confident learner.
Joan Boaler in her book Mathematical Mindsets states that “…for the vast majority of children — about 95% — any level of school maths are within their reach.” Further to the point, Nobel prize winner in Physics (1965), Richard Feynman: “I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There’s no miracle people. “
With the right support and encouragement to think for yourself you are perfectly capable of learning maths and of being able to obtain a good pass in your exams. So please take this on board and adjust your mindset accordingly.
From my side it makes me really happy to think that, “I explained that well”. I don’t believe that one can teach effectively if one has forgotten what it is like not to know something.
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“The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn.” Seymour Papert
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Doing well in maths effectively means becoming better at reasoning. Improving your reasoning ability is a key skill that good tuition should foster.
Since you are looking for a [human] tutor on First Tutors then I expect that you will see the sense of ChatGPT o3’s response to my question (May 2025): “Can an LLM such as o3 teach people to reason?”:
“In sum, an LLM such as o3 can be a powerful catalyst for learning to reason—through targeted questioning, example generation, and feedback—but human critical oversight and deliberate practice remain indispensable.”
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For online tuition I use:
A MacBook Pro, and an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil.
Zoom for screen sharing (I have a pro account and can offer 1 hour without interruption).
Explain Everything (an electronic whiteboard). It’s good if you are willing to use the whiteboard to show how you would attempt solutions. One of the advantages of online tuition is that since we share the whiteboard you can see what I’m writing directly in front of you, as I can when you are writing. This means that I can provide commentary on your working; praise things you are getting right, and alert you to mistakes, in effect it gives me some insight into your strengths and weaknesses or misconceptions. The Explain Everything whiteboard also has a laser pointer and this makes it easy to point at and talk about the working on the screen and I encourage tutees to do this. There are apps available for Explain Everything on all platforms.
To aid in the development of understanding I encourage the use of Desmos, GeoGebra, Wolfram Alpha, LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, and Graphing calculators (I have a Casio FX GC50, and a TI-Nspire CX II).
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Please ensure that you read my terms and conditions which include the details of a late cancellation charge. The main T&Cs are that a late cancellation charge of £10 is due when tutorials are cancelled with less than 24 hours notice, and that payment is due within 7 days of a tutorial taking place.
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Your data
As part of delivering online tuition to you or your family member, I collect certain personal details (contact and education related). I keep them securely on my computer, no details are stored in the “cloud”.
I have no need to share them with any other parties and therefore your privacy will not be compromised.
Any feedback that is shared publicly is shared in such a way that the identity of the individuals involved is not.