James

Tutoring Experience

- Taught the pure courses in OCR, Edexcel and AQA for A-Level Maths and Further Maths, to several students, with almost every student going on to surpass their predicted grade, or receive an A* in the subject. I also have considerable experience teaching Statistics and Mechanics for both of these qualifications. I aim to motivate students by providing intuition for the topic at hand, so that the courses seem less arbitrary and the lessons become more memorable.

- Created numerous information packs on difficult areas, such as integration, complex numbers and number theory, which provide tips for how to solve the toughest questions that get asked, and how best to think about each of these topics.

- Guided ten students preparing for university applications with exams, and also high school competitions and A-Level. I have helped with MAT, TMUA, STEP and TSA, as well as UKMT challenges, AMC and AIME, British and American Olympiads. With these, I have helped students of different ability levels make substantial progress, among mathematics and economics applicants, and also students who want to develop their ability over a longer period.

- Given around one hundred mock interviews to twelve different applicants so far. These have mainly been conducted on students in China, and students in the Chinese diaspora in the UK and Australia, as well as other British students. I interviewed at Trinity College, which has a unique style of test, so I am well-equipped to offer this, although I have mainly interviewed using the typical Oxbridge-style form.

- Supported students with their personal statements at every stage of the process, from a six month project with weekly sessions, to reviewing and improving applications hours before the deadline. I was previously the premier personal statement developer and reviewer for mathematics with another tutoring agency, and so have been asked to run workshops for other instructors to improve their advice in order to professionalize the service. The areas I have helped with include Algebra (Ring Theory, Group Theory), Analysis, Combinatorics (Graph Theory, Counting Problems, etc) and Geometry.

Tutoring Approach

I am an engaging third year mathematics student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where I have focused mainly on analysis and statistics with a view to studying mathematical biology. In school, I competed in numerous Olympiads

I have access to a great bundle of questions, so that I can tailor these, as well as every other facet of the learning process, to the student's strengths and weaknesses. I make sure to pick out any misunderstandings a student might have, and, having taught this content before, I draw from this wealth of experience to teach ideas in a more intuitive order, learning from confusions that previous students had.

As a tutor, I make sure that, wherever possible, each new piece of content is based naturally on the previous, in line with the current literature on Cognitive Load Theory, so as not to limit the working memory, and to ensure that intuition transfers to long-term understanding as quickly as possible.