Gul E Lala Khattak

My lessons start with watching, not teaching.

Before I decide what to teach a student, I need to know exactly where their understanding actually breaks down, not where it looks like it breaks down from a grade or a quiz score. So in the first session or two, I give a spread of problems, easy through hard, and I let the student work through them mostly in silence, writing down not just their answers but their assumptions, their false starts, anything they're unsure about. That's usually where the real information is. A student can get a right answer for the wrong reason, or a wrong answer for a reason that's actually quite close to correct, and neither of those shows up on a normal test.

From there, I build a real baseline. Every question I ask is tied back to a specific skill and a specific course objective, so we're never guessing at what to work on next. I document this properly, session by session, so progress is visible and specific rather than a vague sense of "getting better."

My teaching is built around one core idea: real learning happens when a student runs into the gap between what they currently know and what a genuinely challenging, slightly unfamiliar problem demands of them. That gap is uncomfortable, but it's also exactly what forces new understanding to form. My job isn't to remove that discomfort by handing over the answer. It's to structure the problem so the gap is the right size, close enough to be solvable, wide enough to actually teach something. I also spend real time on command terms, students often lose marks not because they don't know the material, but because they misread what a question is actually asking them to do.

A bit about my background: I trained originally as an engineer, then went back for a Master's in Innovative Technologies in Learning, and a second Master's in Political and Educational Philosophy. I've spent years teaching STEM subjects in IB MYP and DP settings at an IB World School in Islamabad, and I'm trained in both the IB's Approaches to Learning framework and the MYP Sciences curriculum. I also hold a Cambridge Lower Secondary Mathematics extension certificate.

What you can expect from working with me: a real diagnostic before any teaching starts, lessons that build toward genuine understanding rather than memorized steps, careful attention to what exam questions are actually asking, and a documented record of exactly where you've grown and what's still in progress.