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Maths Methods Tutor. Is it important?

1. First work out why you need a Maths Methods Tutor

The first thing you need to do is work out what sort of thing you need a Maths Methods tutor for, so different students require different things. A student who is really struggling in class obviously needs to understand the concepts, whereas a student who understands all textbook questions but is losing marks in their tests and exams obviously needs a different type of support. So first off, it's a good idea to work out exactly what the student needs, and any decent tutor can help them work this out.

2. If the student has trouble with the concepts

If a student is overall having trouble with the concepts themselves and has a hard time conceptualizing them, having a tutor might not be of help because one to two hours a week really isn't enough time for them to solidify and understand this knowledge. Now if they had access to a resource that explained each concept in detail using colorful animations and simple language, this would obviously help them out, which is why a number of years ago I created the Maths Methods video tutorials. They can watch these any time and then if they do have any questions they can ask the teacher or ask a tutor and we'll find that they get a lot more benefit from a resource like this.

3. The student has trouble with Exams/Tests/Worded Questions

Another common situation is the student's fine with all of the textbook questions, but as soon as they get into a test or an exam, they find that they've lost a lot of marks. There's two factors to this. The first one is that generally in year 11, and certainly in year 12, the difficulty of the questions are much harder than anything else they've encountered before. So you'll find that the average score of the class ends up going down, but this doesn't mean that the person's gotten worse at the subject or they're not as smart as they were. It's simply that the questions themselves are a lot more difficult. It's a little bit like if a person's playing football with their friends and then suddenly had to play for like the national team or the AFL or something like that. They'd obviously not do as well because the standard is so much higher. Having said this, understanding these sorts of questions is a skill that they need to develop as well as learning how to maximize their score under time conditions. Some tutors can help with this, but there's also a lot of study technique and exam technique that they need to learn as well that not everybody is familiar with and know how to tailor to the student.

4. Better than a Maths Methods Tutor

There are other situations as well, but these are probably the two most common. Now, in these situations, I find that either if the student is able to do exam questions by themselves and do those regularly under timed conditions, this is often enough to help them go from understanding the textbook questions and concepts and not scoring well in a testing exam to scoring very, very well.

However, if the student has trouble with the concepts, what we have found is that our weekly online classes that go over each concept in detail and get them to do practice questions actually enables them to understand the concepts better and significantly improves their test scores.

We regularly see people go from failing to 70% or even 20% to 90% isn't that uncommon. So a lot of students find that the Maths Methods Academy, which is weekly online classes, is actually more effective than a tutor due to its structured environment and more visual explanations.