Jessica

Tutoring Experience

I tutor a range of ages from year 6 to year 13 which demonstrates my ability to break complex concepts down to the very basics and build them back up to A-level/IB.

Having grown up in Hong Kong, I studied the IB programme, and am able to communicate clearly to students from different cultures and backgrounds.
Specifically, I have tutored two students in IB physics who achieved 7/7. To do so, I have a wealth of presentations breaking down the theory and a bank of topic wise questions to practice the theory. As exams draw closer, we move to focusing on past papers.

I also support their internal assessment writing, having scored 24/25 on my own.

I have tutored 3 GCSE students in Maths, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.

I make tailored lesson plans each week to go through the areas that they have been struggling with during school. These students have all increased massively in ability in only six months of lessons. I really enjoy watching their confidence increase as the lessons go on, going over their test papers to spot where they were making mistakes and how we can work on this in future.

I have tutored 3 students around year 6-8 level in Maths, ensuring that their foundations in fractions, decimals, ratios, percentages etc are extremely solid before building them up into more complex ideas like algebra.

For example, I recently support a year 6 in their science fair project. He wanted to demonstrate technology from Hyperloop (an open-access design produced by Elon Musk that I work on at university, looking to design a high-speed levitating train). So, I broke down the hyperloop technology to its fundamental electromagnetism and explained the concepts in a way for him to present.

My favourite part of tutoring is when the students ask me challenging physics questions that get us both thinking.

At university, I am the president of an engineering society called Engineers without Borders Warwick. Since becoming president, I have catapulted an outreach scheme where I trained a group of students on how to teach GCSE and A-level Maths and Physics and partnered with local schools in the Coventry area.

Each week we would either run a workshop on renewable energy, letting the children build wind turbines and explore different energy sources, or an after-school GCSE tutoring session where students could come and work through questions, they found difficult.

The aim being to help engage more women and ethnic minorities into stem subjects, providing the type of guidance I lacked when wanting to enter this industry.

Tutoring Approach

I tutor remotely using an iPad and zoom so that I can write and draw on my iPad in live time as the student watches.

This also allows the students to draw on the screen so that I can see their working. I don’t just teach the students how to answer the questions in their exams, but also, I teach them why each method works and make sure that they can apply the theory in different scenarios.

As a result, my students not only increase in ability of the subject, but also in enjoyment. As I study mechanical engineering, I can apply real world scenarios to the theory I teach within Maths and Physics, demonstrating the value of learning such theory.

I am more of a visual learner, so I use visual techniques like drawings and props to demonstrate the theory, making the lessons engaging and to give more of an intuitive feel for complex concepts.

For example, when teaching about resistance in electricity (how as the length of a wire increases, the resistance increases, but as the cross-sectional area of a wire increases, the resistance decreases), I use real wires of different lengths and cross-sectional areas to first check that they understand the theory, asking which wire they think would charge my laptop faster, but also to demonstrate the application of such theory.

When teach IB level subjects, I use PowerPoints to go through the theory. If my student comes to me not understanding a specific area of the syllabus, I will take them through the presentations, breaking down the theory by drawing and showing videos. Then, once they understand the theory better, I use basic question worksheets to ensure the theory is understood. Then, we would move to topic-wise past paper questions to demonstrate how they need to be able to apply the theory in the exam.

When their exams are approaching, we would move to going over past papers.