Undergraduate Maths student at Warwick with 2 years of tutoring experience - Maths is more than formulae for you to memorise!

The best way to get better at Maths is to just do it! So we will use a shared whiteboard to work on problems and discuss our ideas. Following on from this, engagement from the student is by far the most important aspect of these sessions - so I will always begin by asking what you would like to cover and if you have any problems in particular to go over. If not, then I will always have something prepared for us to look at.

The most important part of Maths is solving problems, so after perhaps a quick debrief on the topic at hand we will go straight into problem solving. To make use of the limited time, I will first ask you what ideas you have - and most importantly - why you think they would work. If the ideas you present are in the right direction I will watch you proceed, maybe skipping some more laborious steps based on your strengths. Otherwise, I will give you a hint that will hopefully let you proceed in a better way and then perhaps discuss why your initial ideas did not lead to best approach at the end if we have time. This is the problem solving paradigm that I believe is crucial to learn for mastering Mathematics.

Another crucial step comes at the end of the lesson - practice. I will give you a set of (optional!) problems for you to choose from to practice after each lesson, but what is even more vital is learning which problems are worth doing for the best progress, and this is another skill I will focus on helping you develop.

Overall these lessons will hopefully give you the confidence to tackle topics and concepts you are struggling with, but I also have another goal of presenting Mathematics as more than just the formulae you learn at school, but rather as a set of very fundamentally connected principles.