Mike

I enjoy tailoring my teaching to the differing needs and styles of my students and the position they`re at in their learning journey. I`m friendly and relaxed but disciplined and efficient.

I much prefer my students to discover mathematics rather than them having it spoon fed to them. To achieve this, I ask targetted questions which help them to extend their existing knowledge and we build towards solutions to problems which would otherwise be beyond their ability.

I prefer understanding to rote memorisation but just getting through the material is sometimes the right approach, particularly when a test is approaching, or in the final stages of the GCSE year. I`m not averse to drilling subject matter and exam technique in these situations.

When the time does allow, I love to let the student divert me on a tangent. There`s nothing wrong with talking about visualising 4D space as a projection in 3D when you were discussing area and volume scaling. If they`re asking, they`re engaged and if they`re engaged, they`re learning.

I love to build confidence and self-awareness skills by ruthlessly analysing mistakes. That`s where most of the learning is to be found. As the saying goes mistakes are expected, accepted, inspected and corrected. I never criticise, or especially ridicule, a mistake (unless the student is comfortable with a bit of jokey banter) but I never let one slide either; even if the conclusion is "that was just a silly arithmetic error". And I`m not above making my own from time to time either. That`s a good opportunity to show that none of us is perfect and I`ll use it as an opportunity to openly and gratefully examine and dismantle my own weaknesses in front of my students.

Oh, and it`s tea, white and one, please.

Availability: Full time

Willing to travel: 8 miles

Experience: I have a Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering from Bristol University and I`ve done twenty years as a software engineer, mainly in the aerospace and defence sectors in the UK, Europe and US. I worked for NASA and I worked as a rocket scientist but foolishly never contrived to combine the two. How cool would that have been?

I spent seven years home educating my daughter, which was an absolute revelation and what gave me the bug for tutoring. There`s something wonderful about the focus and bespoke nature of one-to-one tuition and that has led me to doing two years teaching GCSE mathematics as a private tutor.

Being married to a teacher I`ve also been roped into twenty odd years of volunteering on and off in my wife`s school, helping prep kids for selective secondary school entrance examinations and on outings and field trips together with the inevitable sugar paper and staple gun classroom display routine. I`ve also invigilated GCSE and A Level exams in a local school.