Toby Shepherd

I have been teaching maths at a variety of levels for the last 5 years, ranging from work in schools with students from KS3 up to A level and running first-year tutorials at university in analysis, probability statistics and linear algebra.

My general approach to sessions focuses firstly on building intuition and deeper understanding for concepts - this is in my opinion the most important thing to learn from studying mathematics. This involves building understanding of concepts from pictures and examples in the real world - while maths is abstract it always pulls from something tangible to help us understand it! This usually involves short presentations of concepts, whilst interacting with students to ask them questions and build a dialogue to test their understanding.

The bulk of my lessons after this are focussed on working through problems. I will set 1 or 2 homework/assignment questions for the students to attempt and then spend 5/10 minutes going through the solutions to these problems, using this as an opportunity to help build exam technique and building a general framework to help approach unseen problems in exams.

The rest of the session I will split between working through problems with students and giving them some time themselves to have a go before reviewing - while it is important to go through examples myself, I think it is advantageous for them to attempt questions themselves and prepare for an exam scenario while having my support in order to build confidence.

Building intuition and practising questions are the main focus of these sessions, although I highly recommend students practise calculation based questions themselves as well outside sessions - as my old lecturer once said "maths is not a spectator sport!"

I believe with the understanding I can help you build up and together with the calculation practise is precisely what is required to excel in any exam.