Choosing A Tutor
In taking on a private tutor you should be confident that your specific needs are being listened to and will be addressed. You should also be confident in the professionalism of the tutor you take on. I hope that my biography will reassure you, but do get in touch with further questions if there is anything else you would like to know.
I Can Help Your Confidence Increase By:
-
improving your understanding of chemistry
-
helping you develop revision strategies and study techniques
-
helping you improve your examination technique
-
preparing you for university application and interviews
-
helping you prepare effectively for re-takes if you need to improve your grade
To help me do this, I have a wide range of resources written by me, alongside text books, recommended websites, curated practice questions, extension resources and visual resources. Copies of materials related to the topics we discuss and access to question resources will be provided as part of the lesson cost.
Lesson Format And Style
A Level Lessons will usually be an hour long, and GCSE lessons 30 minutes. For A level you can have longer sessions if you wish, but anything longer than 90 minutes is not advised - there is only so much a person can take in in one sitting, and working 1-to-1 is pretty intensive! Better to have two shorter lessons at different points in the week than one 'mega-lesson' where we are all exhausted at the end!
My style is informal but rigorous. I'm absolutely determined that you will understand things properly, and so I dig down into the theory to get to the fundamentals and the details, rather than just teaching you 'short cuts' or 'methods' to get things right. This 'black box thinking', as I like to call it, is shaky ground to be on - sometimes the question will not be 'like the ones I've practiced' and then what do you do? Of course, once you have understood something, there is nothing wrong with applying a method to ensure questions are answered fully and mistakes are not made, and so exam technique and efficiency will be part of the story too.
During the lesson I will go over key areas of the theory and provide explanatory notes which we look at as we go along and annotate as necessary - whether that is online or face-to-face at my home in Oxford. It is a good idea to go over the notes in the next day or so after the session to help the ideas bed down. We may try questions on the topic during the lesson but more usually this will be up to you in your own time, and we can go over problems that have arisen the next time.
Practicing questions is a really important part of the learning process and to help with that I will provide you with strategies to help you use your time effectively, along with the resources you will need to be able to put those strategies into place. Once a few questions have been done on a particular topic, patterns usually become apparent in terms of the kinds of the things examiners tend to ask.
A level and AS Chemistry
The choice to study chemistry A level or equivalent opens many doors for the future. A level is quite the transition from GCSE, and while this is of course true for all subjects, it is widely thought that chemistry is one of the biggest ‘jumps’. I’ve given quite a bit of thought to why this might be the case, and I’ve concluded that it comes down to the skill-set you need for A level chemistry:
-
An ability to make logical deductions
-
An analytical mind which can grasp and then apply concepts - some of which are pretty demanding!
-
An ability to think in ‘abstract’ terms - we cannot literally ‘see’ what goes on in a chemical reaction as everything is so small, so we work in 'models' and use very technical language to describe the behaviour of matter.
-
Competent numeracy - particularly an ability to think in ratios/proportions and to understand rate of change
-
Practical ability - this is inherently a practical subject!
-
An aptitude for recall of factual information - you can't get away from the fact you need to learn some facts, but there is less recall than you might think
A good grade at chemistry A level shows University admissions tutors that you have developed these 'hard currency' skills, and that's why the subject opens doors to so many other degrees other than Chemistry, Materials, Medicine, Vet. Science or Dentistry, which are the ones that people most commonly associate. But the honest truth is that students have not really had to demonstrate or develop most of these skills to any useful extent in GCSE chemistry, hence the potentially huge culture shock of how different the subject feels when the realities of A level become clear!
The pace of teaching is incredibly fast, so on top of all the above students also have to make the additional transition into a course where every lesson is completely different from the last, and where study skills become much more important than before. Putting all this together means it can all be pretty overwhelming at the beginning - so some good support to get the right mindset in place early on is invaluable. In addition, the second year of study much of the content builds upon a secure foundation of knowledge and understanding from the first, rather than just being 'different' topics, so it's important to start well.
The second year allows the student to mature and really make connections between topic areas as well as meet a lot of new and more technical material. By the end of the course this can be very rewarding: it becomes clear to students that they could not be learning and understanding the final topic areas without all of their prior knowledge to support them.
GCSE
The GCSE curriculum has many different flavoured topics and a final examination deadline sometimes approaching rather quickly! Topic areas are often distinct from one another, but there is a set of core skills which include understanding key theory and applying it, numeracy and graphing skills, the recall of quite a lot of factual information and the understanding of some practical chemistry. Being secure with the main ideas is one of the keys to success here, but a clear understanding of exam technique is super-important. If you are confident in this, then you are much more likely to do yourself justice in the final exams.