Teaching Tips

Off-topic
1

I’ve been offered to tutor this kid in Maths and Physics. I have no problem understanding the stuff, but explaining it and making someone understand it is a little bit more complicated for me. Does anyone have any teaching tips? The boy is about tennish.

2

lots of examples

3

Uh…I did that last year SO much…it was hard, but I got it…eventually, applying them to real-life situations worked for some…for my brother it was him killing me’s for subtraction, splitting me in half, splitting his sister’s and their clones, farting, splitting farts…

4

Thank you for your replys!
I had my first lesson yesterday. It was a bit difficult in the beginning, but then I kind of got the hang of it, I think. I find that breaking things down and explaining them step by step helps a lot.

5

try explaining your though process without skipping any steps. When someone is good at math, they tend to skip a lot of the inbetween steps, which will confuse someone who doesn’t understand what is going on.

6

I don’t have a thought process as such. What I have is so erratic that it’s just completely unexplainable(believe me). Half of the time I just know the answer.

7

I taught Math for 2 years a long time ago!
some hints:

  • every person is different: tips for teaching are not recipes. you first have to understand your student.

  • very important step: why learn maths in the first place? if it is just for curricullum purposes you won’t get far. I had some Cocky students and challenged them with simple money problems and showed them they were in fact losing money (I also used funny geometrical problems).
    then they decided it was about time to listen to me!

  • do not explain everything: just push more and more hints and let them build their own “image” of the process. then discuss the beauty of elegant structures… it takes longer but the results are much more lasting: they start thinking (not trying to apply recipes!)

8

Ask questions, and let them discover the process by themselves…it might not work so much for the basic concepts, but for the more advanced ones, it works great.

9

For longer questions that involve writing down working and stuff try showing them how to do it then rubbing out/covering over what you did and make them do it. They’ll hate you for it but it seems to work. Also make sure they are sound on their basic principles. If someone cant add or subtract normally then they will struggle with algebra. Build up basic skills and take it from there.