LoginThomas - Stroud tutor
Information About Thomas:
Personal Description:
I have over 8 years of experience tutoring mathematics face to face and in groups. Tutoring maths is my strongest passion and I'm always looking to help more students.
I am self employed and I run my own business providing Social Media Marketing services, owning 50% of this company. I thoroughly enjoy managing, growing and expanding the business to work with more like-minded individuals. As this business grows, I am able to assign tasks/jobs and free up more time for myself to focus on my true passion. Tutoring Mathematics!
Teaching Experience:
My Dad is a professor at Bristol University and a tutor at Wycliffe College. He introduced me to maths tutoring 8 years ago during my A-levels. He runs maths tuition group sessions during the holidays of 2-5 students at a time. At the age of 17 I helped him with tutoring his GCSE students and I fell in love with teaching and grew an even stronger passion for mathematics. For over 8 years now I have been helping him with these group sessions and we have become a great team. With the two of us, we can have larger groups and give each student more attention. My main role in these sessions is to focus on 1 or 2 students at a time who are struggling in certain areas or who have learning disabilities such as dyslexia.
This experience enabled me to become a one to one tutor as I grew such a strong passion for tutoring. I had the skills, the resources and the expertise. I then found my own clients online and I`ve been very successful in helping my students achieve the grades they where aiming for, or higher. For some students, I have helped them discover that they do in-fact have a passion for mathematics!
I have learnt from the best, My Dad is a true expert at this, even now 8 years later I frequently come to him for his expertise and we both discuss and share knowledge and resources.
I believe I am very good at providing a calm and focused lesson for my students. I want my students to enjoy the lessons rather than feel pressured and stressed. I have also proven to be very good with students that have learning difficulties such as dyslexia. I have dyslexia myself so I understand the struggles they may go through.
Tutoring Approach:
When it comes to teaching any area of maths, I believe any student must understand it in two different ways. They must have a "Relational understanding" and an "Instrumental understanding".
The Relational understanding always comes first. This is essentially the logical understanding of a topic in mathematics. This logical understanding is something they can always rely on. They won't suffer from information overload because they have a much deeper, natural understanding for the topic. The way I achieve this as a tutor is to essentially prove and demonstrate everything to the students before they try it themselves.
If they still struggle to understand the topic, this is because there is a gap in their learning. This is easy to resolve by tracking back to more simple questions / topics and building up their core knowledge.
The Instrumental understanding comes afterwards, the Instrumental method is really just a quick method on how to do it and get it right. Essentially having the student follow a step by step guide to get the answer. This is important to learn because the student will be more pressured for time when they take their exams. However, without the relational/logical understanding, the instrumental method can be frustrating for the student because they will be relying entirely on their ability to remember these steps and rules, rather than understand them.
Not only can this lead to an information overload, but the student can also lose or even never discover their passion for maths! There's nothing more frustrating then practicing maths by following an empty set of rules with no genuine understanding.
Once the students have the relational understanding of the topic, and have been taught the instrumental method, it is important for them to practice the instrumental method until it becomes automatic. I always allow good time in every lesson for the student to practice. I often give the student several questions (5-15 minutes max) of homework so that they can recap/practice the next day.
In the standard school classroom environment, most teachers won't always have the time to teach the relational understanding to the entire class, meaning they will rely on only teaching the instrumental methods for many of the topics. I believe this is a reason why many students find maths frustrating and never unlock their passion for mathematics. Of course, no discredit to the teachers, they have an entire class of students to teach and the pressure of covering every topic before the exam. But considering this, I believe the solution is for every student to have as much 1 to 1 attention as possible with a tutor that can teach them both the instrumental methods and the relational/logical understanding of each topic.
Subjects Taught:
Qualifications:
- Diploma in Higher Education: Product Design
Further Information:
| Availability: | Weekends / Weekdays (all times) |
| Types of Tutoring: | Travels to you / Online |
| References Supplied? | Yes |
| Current DBS/CRB Check? | Yes |
