Wilf

My Passion & How I Inspire

In my experience there are two key issues students face that stop them getting the grades they deserve when exam season comes around.

Firstly, I find that students are introduced to previous exam resources, such as papers and examiners reports, at too late a stage in the learning process. This creates a wealth of content to tear through in a short time, and often exams have niche ways of asking questions, which if only attempted just before the exam can cause lots of undue stress and worry.

Secondly, students can lose the drive to learn, and often switch off when introduced to concepts that seem dry and abstract. A page full of letters and numbers can seem very tedious and intimidating if the overall purpose of the methods used are not understood.

Being able to relate high level concepts to real world applications was one of the joys of my degree course in Engineering, and an excellent motivator for tackling difficult content. For this reason, I like to put maths in context, explaining how certain theorems and formulae were derived, who by, and why, and how they're used today in practical applications. In order to prepare students for exams, I introduce real past paper questions and strategies alongside new content, so that students have a body of experience dealing with exam-style situations from the very beginning.

My appreciation for the subjects I tutor comes from having had excellent tuition myself when I was in high school. I was lucky enough to experience incredibly well planned and engaging lessons, and this made maths and science really click for me in a way it had not done before. Having that lightbulb moment, where all the abstract ideas come together and make sense, really inspired me and is the source of my desire to be an excellent tutor. I am a very empathetic person, and teaching comes naturally to me as I really enjoy having the opportunity to help other people understand and process complicated and difficult concepts. I try to carry this into my lessons by being down to earth and friendly, and making the effort to show students the interesting and useful side of the content they are learning, so that it doesn’t seem like a frustrating and confusing mess of numbers and letters. I believe that learning can be and should be enjoyable and worthwhile at all levels, and this is always a focus in my teaching.