Hannah’s Tutoring

If you know, you know 😭

“I’m just not a maths person” is almost never true.

It’s usually one missed thing. Fractions, negatives, rearranging an equation. Maths is cumulative, so everything after that gets harder for a reason that has nothing to do with ability.

The tell: genuine difficulty is even. Gaps are patchy. If they’re fine at some parts and hopeless at others, it’s a gap, and gaps are the most fixable thing I deal with.

Hannah 💗

Every August 😭

When September goes badly everyone assumes she’s forgotten the content. That’s usually the smaller half.

The bigger half is that she’s stopped doing the things that made her able to learn. Concentrating. Starting something hard without being told to. Working at a pace.

Those go quickly over six weeks and take much longer to rebuild than facts do. You can reteach a topic in an hour. You can’t reteach the ability to sit down and begin.

Twenty minutes, three times a week, on the subjects that matter. An hour a week each, out of six weeks off.

Little and often beats a heroic fortnight in August.

Hannah 💗

Unfollow now if the IB one bothers you 💗




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DP2, if you know you know.

Six subjects that all have to pass. Four IAs due in the same fortnight. A 4,000 word extended essay. TOK. CAS hours you’ve been quietly lying about since September. And a points total you refresh every night like it’s going to change.

The IB has no weak link, and nobody warns you about that part.

I did it. Got 42/45. Genuinely the best decision I made, and I’d pick it again. But if your teen is drowning in the first term of DP2, it’s almost never the content. It’s the load, and it’s manageable with the right triage 💗

The kids who get straight 9s at GCSE are often the ones who struggle most at A-Level.

Sounds backwards, I know. Here’s why it happens.

GCSE rewards one thing: learn the method, spot the question type, reproduce it. Work hard, memorise well, and you can get a 9 without ever really having to think.

A-Level quietly changes the game. The questions stop telling you which method to use. And the strategy that earned top grades for five years suddenly stops working.

It’s not the grade that breaks them. It’s what they decide about themselves when it does.

Comment their subject and I’ll tell you where the jump catches people 💗

5 things parents spend money on in an exam year that do almost nothing:

revision guides they won’t open
apps that feel productive but teach nothing
big group courses that move at everyone’s pace except your kid’s
colour coded stationery

and the expensive one. starting in march.

i mean march of the exam year. when everyone panics at once, cramming a year of gaps into eight weeks, and you’re paying premium rates for a tutor because it’s suddenly an emergency.

the exact same work starting now, in september, is calmer, cheaper and does so much more. an hour a week from autumn beats a frantic march every single time.

nobody does it in september because it doesn’t feel urgent yet. that’s exactly why it works.

what actually moves a grade is boring anyway. past paper questions on the 2 topics they’re avoiding, marked honestly.

number 5 isn’t even a purchase. it’s just the one that costs the most 💗

Struggling and bored look completely identical from the outside. And they need opposite fixes.

Give a bored kid more of the work that bored them and it gets worse. Give them something genuinely harder and something clicks back on.

The tricky bit is telling which one you’ve got. Comment what you’re seeing with yours and I’ll tell you honestly which it sounds like 💗

A U to a 5,5 is a bigger jump than a 7 to a 9. Nobody makes content about that one.

Every year the internet fills up with straight 9s. And the student who went from failing to passing, who actually changed the most, gets nothing.

She was on track for a U in science. She finished on 5,5. That is a whole different life, GCSE science opens or closes so many doors at 16 and most people never realise it happened.

Rooting for every kid sitting in the “I’m just not a science person” seat right now. You usually are. Someone just hasn’t shown you how you learn yet 💗