Mark Darling - Home Tutor

19/11/2022

20/01/2022

Someone - no names to respect their privacy - has been emailing me. She asks if I could tutor her daughter and what availability I have. I reply to her email and hear nothing. A few weeks later she emails me, complains that I did not reply to her earlier email, and asks for my availability again.

Perhaps my emails are going into her junk/spam folder? Does she check this folder?

I do not know how to contact her since all I have is an email address. It is not that I am losing business but that I am not able to help her daughter. What to do?

06/09/2020

I found a document that I must have produced in the late 1980’s. Two sheets of A4 printout held together by a paperclip that also attached the paper envelope holding a five and a quarter inch (5.25”) floppy disk (remember them?). I have two copies of this document.

After thirty years the datafile has probably faded into oblivion; finding a working 5.25” disk drive will be hard; created using WordStar which surprisingly is available online.

So many times my students tell me that they do not need to develop pencil & paper learning skills when they have an app that can do all the hard work for them. These apps are great but you cannot guarantee they will always be available - there will always be pencil & paper and things can be learnt, even if it has to be done the hard way.

I can read my document only because I printed it out. Pre-IT technology. Just a pity the document’s contents are so bleah.

20/08/2020

Congratulations to those who got the grades they needed for what they have planned to do next.

My sympathies to those who did not. But bear in mind that life is a sequence of things not going the way you wanted and you having to change your plans. You could sit exams this autumn or even next summer. There is no age limit to sitting GCSEs or A levels. But as you get older your commitments (job, kids etc) get in the way and you have to pay for it yourself.

I saw a girl on TV say she was doomed with the wrong GCSE grades. She is knocked back but not knocked out. Re-adjust and re-sit.

24/06/2020

I was talking to one of my students and he was telling me he was planning when he left school to follow his father into his trade. There is nothing wrong with that. Then I realised that the job of a teacher is to make sure that students have as many options as possible. This lad will be taking up his father’s trade because he wants to and not because there is nothing else he can do. If it doesn’t work out he won’t be trapped but have the GCSEs that will allow him to try other things. Are any of us doing the job we planned to do when we left school?

01/04/2020

Even though I am now in lock-down, my intention is to continue tutoring but now over the internet using Zoom. My commitment is to my students. With the schools potentially closed until the new academic year in September, I fear that many of my students will get out of the habit of doing their schoolwork. The current Year 10 will have two terms to get back into the swing of things, catch up on what they missed during the lock-down and learn new stuff before hitting their exams. I am available to help them keep “match fit”. We will muddle through and they will be ready for their exams. Good luck and keep washing those hands!

03/01/2020

ON REVISION #7: In the early 1990’s there was a fashion for pregnant women to listen to the music of Mozart in the belief that this would increase their unborn child’s intelligent. While I am not sure about the “Mozart Effect”, a relaxed mother would not have done her child any harm.

If you force children to sit in silence, they will use their imaginations to fill the void. Their minds will wander, and they will daydream. Background music fills that void for them and helps them concentrate. This makes revision more effective. But it has to be the right music.

It cannot have words to sing along with: It cannot have an upbeat tempo to tap feet to: It cannot have memorable tunes to hum: It has to be boring so that it remains in the background and is not a distraction itself. Classical music is ideal for this (e.g. Mozart).

Previously I wrote about working in 20-minute sessions on different subjects with 5-minute gaps in between. These gaps are opportunity for you to take some exercise to stretch the muscles and refresh your brain. Some people go for a run. I suggest instead a 5-minute burst of wild, uninhibited dancing to modern music, like you were at a rave. Then settle down and get on with the next 20-minute session on a different subject.

Some of my students study at home with classical music playing in the background, but this can be annoying to others in the house. Other students wear headphones and their 5-minute gap is a silent disco. Please do not play the music so loudly to damage your hearing. Whatever music you play, as long as it fits the conditions that I listed, it is so much better than trying to study in silence. Is this a modern-day alternative to the Mozart effect?

26/12/2019

ON REVISION #6: At my first, assessment meeting with a prim, clever young woman in year 11, she proudly showed me an impressive pile of every one of her maths exercise books for Years 7 to 10 and a bit of 11. She must have had at least one new book every term.

All the maths she had ever been taught was somewhere in those dark blue exercise books. But she could not tell me where. If she was revising a topic, she would have to work her way through all of these books to find her notes. Even if she did find them, they would be what she scribbled during class, which may well be unreadable if they make sense at all.

I suggested to this student that she work her way through her exercise books. For each new topic she would start a page of A4. This will be just a draft of the final revision note. Every time she found new information on that topic, she would add it to that page, simply and in pencil only. Once she had passed through her exercise books, she would look at each topic’s page, add information from other sources (such as revision guides, text books or the internet), make sure she fully understood the topic and produce her final version, carefully designed and in full colour. That way she would have something for her to revise that topic. Her pile of many exercise books is now a pile of fewer pages of A4 and she can find what she wants to revise.

Sadly, the young lady decided she did not want to see me again after our first assessment session. I do not know how she fared in the exams that summer. I hope she followed my advice. It is a pity that nobody had told her to make her own revision notes at the start of Year 7. How much better placed she would have been as she came up to her exams.

16/12/2019

I must get myself a 2-it, particularly one of the round ones. Because so many times I ask my students when they are going to revise a particular topic and they tell me they will do it when they get around to it. Get it? It is a bit of a cheesy joke, but it does have a point.

Consider two students: One has put into her diary that she will revise Pythagoras on the 3rd of next month and the other has that job on his list of things to do and will get around to it sometime. He, the second student, may well do that revision, probably once in a rush just before an exam.

My confidence is in the first student. She will do the revision on the day and then schedule a next date to do it again depending on how well it all went: next week if it was not a success and months away if it all went well. For this you need to learn how to use a diary, whether it is physical (my preference) or online.

Having “to do” lists is a start. I have many of them. But to get things done, you need to fix a date, a personal deadline. So, you have a choice of either learning to use a diary or getting a round 2-it and they just do not exist.

09/12/2019

ON REVISION #4. I arrived one evening to be told that my student had been not been at school for a day that week (I did not ask). His mother had sent him to his room to do 3 hours of Maths revision. I looked at the lad standing behind her and he smirked. Then I knew he had done probably 20 minutes of revision and 2 hours 40 minutes of daydreaming - in his case about football, fast cars and maybe girls. Nobody can revise Maths for 3 hours. But they can revise Trigonometry over 20 minutes.

A block of schoolwork should be broken down into a sequence of 20-minute bursts of activity separated by 5 minutes of getting away from the table: Either have a stretch, refill your glass of water, use the lavatory or even dance to some wild disco music. There has to be self-discipline to only break for 5 minutes and then it is back to another 20-minute stretch.
I use a kitchen timer; others use their mobile phones (though there could be a problem with that) or other technology. You have to use something that you can start and then leave alone far enough away from you so you can concentrate on the work, confident that you will be told when the 20 minutes are finished. Do not do use your watch as repeatedly checking it will make 20 minutes feel like a lifetime. Do not ask a friend or parent to keep an eye on the time as you will be distracted by the thought that they might let you down.

You do not have to study the same subject for every 20-minute session. It has been found to be most effective to switch between sessions of subjects you do not like with sessions of more pleasant ones. The variety keeps your mind interested and stops you from getting bored. Again, there has to be the self-discipline to do the difficult subjects as well as the pleasant ones.

My student had been given a 3-hour opportunity to revise for his exams. Had he organized it at all, I am sure he would have made more use of it.

02/12/2019

ON REVISION #3. Many a time I have been shown someone’s revision notes that are pages of text with important words underlined or highlighted. They have taken a block of text with the important stuff mixed in with the unimportant and even colourful, fluorescent highlighting is not enough to separate one from the other.

Remember that the aim of doing revision is so that you can remember all the important stuff when you need it, for example during the exams. Remembering the important stuff usually drags out the not so important details as well.
The process of organizing the contents of a topic into different levels of importance, from vital to trivial, is actually part of the learning process. Highlighting text is part of that process but not the finished product. The best formats for revision notes are those that display the important stuff separately from the unimportant. Mindmaps have that feature; the closer a fact is to the central blob then the more important it is and therefore the more effort is needed to learn it.

Mindmaps are not the only format. Popular are Hierarchical Lists, which are lists within lists. For Maths it is often better to have a top-to-bottom layout where you would have the important things drawn large and colourfully at the top of the page and further detail below and smaller. Consider Pythagoras, what are the important things to know? The equation. So that needs to be shown at the top of the page, in big colourful letters, possibly with a right-angle triangle to show what the letters are about. We remember pictures in colour better than blocks of black-on-white text, so make your notes colourful and memorable.

For the sheet on Pythagoras, the word “Hypotenuse” would be importance, but less so, along with that the theorem can be used to prove a triangle is a right-angle triangle, and (for the Grade 9 types) the equation for 3D Pythagoras. They are noted further down the page. Any trivia about Pythagoras is left out (he started a religion). Remember it is what you need to know that must be included and it is then up to you to decide how much of the rest you want on the revision notes. Try to reduce the clutter.

Whatever – blocks of text with highlighted words are considered the worst!