Information About Anna - Dublin tutor

Personal Description:

Hi ! My name is Anna and I am a 2nd year pharmacy student at Trinity. I have really enjoyed these subjects during my time in school and they were my best subjects on the day of results. I achieved one of the top achieving marks in Junior Certificate maths in 2018.

Tutoring Experience:

I have helped at maths club during 4th year in school, which included helping younger students with their maths homework, math problems and even just if they wanted to pop in to ask a question. It was a nice way for students to ask for help from other students similar enough in age, especially if they felt uncomfortable asking a teacher or being afraid to ask a 'silly' question. This would run every Monday after school for the year. I have also helped my sister and her friend every second weekend or so for about an hour with math problems. I would prepare a bank of questions that they would work through and we would approach each question in the exact same way to help build up habits and stamina on the day of the exam so that even if they were to find themselves completely stuck and overwhelmed on a question, they could rely on these habits and methods to maximise their marks and give it their best attempt.

Approach to Grinds:

My approach to grinds would be a very systematic one. I feel like the best way to maximise marks in an exam is to make your approach to answering questions a routine and this routine then a habit. For example, when doing an accounting question I would know exactly how the layout of my rough work was going to look in order to make it super easy to transcribe the figures onto the real thing. In these grind sessions I would like to empower the students to feel comfortable and confident in how they answer questions by breaking down the preparation into specific, directed practise to where I know rewards the best marks. Another example of this practical approach of this method would be for maths - I would impart strategies for how to tackle the question - I know for a lot of students, they say that as soon as they know what they need to do to get started on a question, the rest is more manageable. I have many strategies on how to effectively plan in your head what is in front of you and what you can do with this information. I am very confident that this will help massively to improve the student's results. Once we know what has been asked of us, we can then move forward practising and perfecting methods on answering - and most importantly thinking of variations in a question that might appear on exam day and being ready for those too! I am a firm believer that these exams are hugely based on your structure and having a logical approach to a question, and this is something I know I am able to deliver. I know a lot of students find maths and accounting very intimidating subjects, ones that you either love or you hate, but I am very confident that we can break them down together and make them seem a lot more manageable, hopefully even enjoyable !

In terms of the practicalities of the grind sessions, I would spend the first lesson getting an idea of where we are starting. I am open to suggestions from the student where they feel they need the most work, things they'd like to look at in particular. I would prepare questions that I feel cover a wide range of problems for the student to solve and would give them a week to complete before our next session. In the next session we would go through each of the questions to ensure that they are comfortable with the concepts. I will reprint the questions that i have assigned and at the end of the session we will retry the ones that they had gotten wrong the first time - without the solution to make sure that not only do they understand the concept but they can put it into practise again. I feel like this is a great way of ensuring that you know what you are doing and not just thinking that you understand it. I also would try implicate the reverse role method - whereby when the student is retrying a question for the second time, they would pretend to be the teacher to me and they would verbalise exactly what they are doing. This will help the student really understand what they are trying to do as they are listening to their thoughts out loud. I found this a huge help on exam day to try verbalise in my head what I could see in front of me and what I might be able to do with this information. I am flexible to suggestions from the student if they feel like trying other methods might help them to learn better and benefit more from the sessions.