David

I have a first class honours degree in mathematics from Cambridge University, achieving one of the top three places across the University among mathematicians in my year. I followed this with a PhD in computer science (later turned into a book), also from Cambridge, and then a 35-year career in tech, working as a software engineer at NASA, Google and Microsoft among other places. Along the way, I did an Advanced Diploma in Counselling, also at Cambridge, and worked part time as a counsellor for several years. I'm now semi-retired, living in beautiful Malvern in Worcestershire (where I come from) with my wife and teenage son.

Tutoring Experience

I have enjoyed teaching and supervising many students at undergraduate level and above over the years. I hope my counselling experience helps too - counselling and teaching are very different, but they both involve listening carefully to the other person and trying to understand issues from their point of view.

Tutoring Approach

More than perhaps any other subject, progress at each stage in mathematics depends on having a clear understanding of previous stages. Current A-level and GCSE students have had a particularly hard time in this regard, with Covid blighting their learning experience, leading to gaps in knowledge which have been hard to address. While one-to-one tutoring works really well online, whole-class lessons are another matter.

My focus is therefore on helping students identify and gain competence in parts of the course they have missed or found difficult; when this is done, it is often relatively straightforward for them to catch up with subsequent topics that depend on the earlier ones. Maths is challenging, but it is finite, and it can be mastered!

While my focus is on teaching A-level students, I also take final-year GCSE students who are intending to do A-level and want to reach their full potential. I don't take students who are only doing GCSE maths because they have to, sorry!