Our First Lesson

Before your first lesson, I’ll send you a Google Meet link by email. If we decide to continue, you’ll use the same link for all future sessions — simple and consistent.

All you need to bring is a pen and paper, though if you have a device that lets you write on my online whiteboard, that can be helpful. If you have any recent school tests, I’d love to see them — they’re not essential, but they give me a useful snapshot of your current level and how you perform under exam conditions.

We’ll start by discussing your goals — what you’d like to achieve, where you think you are now, and what’s motivating you to improve. Then we’ll do some maths together. It’s not a test, it won’t be done in silence and you don’t need to have prepared for it. It’s simply a way for me to see what you’re confident with and what challenges you. You should expect it to feel uncomfortable at times because I’ll be trying to find the limits of what you know. It also gives you an insight into what lessons with me would be like – lots of conversation and curiosity, focused on understanding why maths works, not just how.

If you’re working towards your GCSE, we’ll probably look at topics like fractions, negative numbers, percentages, area, and algebra. For A-level students, we’ll focus on algebraic manipulation and circles, and we might explore differentiation and integration as well.

Throughout the lesson, I’ll be asking you to explain your reasoning — how you got your answers, how confident you feel, and how you check your results. This helps me understand not only what you know, but how you think.

By the end of the session, I’ll have a clear idea of your strengths, key focus areas, and three to five topics for us to tackle next. It’s a great starting point for your learning journey; I’ll keep reassessing you informally as we go and adjusting our plans accordingly.