Greg

After going to school in Northern Ireland, where I studied Maths (A*), Further Maths (A*), Physics (A) and Biology (A) at A-level, I went to Imperial College London to study Mathematics in a 4-year Master's degree, achieving first class honours.

While at school and university, I tutored part-time and so have built up a vast amount of experience since 2009. I joined Keystone in 2016 as a professional tutor, which allows me to solely devote my attention to tutoring.

It is my fundamental belief that making lessons interesting for my students is crucial in effective teaching. This is especially so for mathematics, where a huge amount of learning takes place while students are doing unassisted exercises. Through my encouraging and animated approach to tutorials, I aim to instil a passion in my students, so that they will respond to such exercises with enthusiasm and confidence.

I feel that the needs of every student are unique and that one-on-one tutoring offers the ideal environment to adapt to these needs. Personally, I love the process of forming questions that are tailored to specific students in order to give them a deeper insight into a topic. In my view, this is an art, especially with students who are already on A or A* grades, as it can be quite challenging for a tutor to come up with questions that are pitched correctly: Pitch the level too low and the student is bored and doesn't learn anything new. Pitch too high, and the student won't be able to fully engage with the material, meaning the tutor will have to do most of the work for the student, and so it is of little value to them. But pitch the question just right and the student learns something new and, crucially, learns by going through their own thought process, meaning that they are much more likely to be able to recall the key ideas later.

Ideally, I want my students to feel that every new topic or idea that they come across is something that they could have invented themselves, given enough time and the right initial line of thought. Therefore, when time allows, I tend to teach the reason behind each formula and result that we use in Maths, rather than just teaching how to apply this to a question. I even encourage my more able students to derive these results themselves, with some assistance, where necessary. In recent years, Maths exams at GCSE and A-level have tended to increase in difficulty and I feel, now more than ever, the extra understanding gained by learning in this manner is paramount in setting students up for the more difficult questions on their paper; when an unfamiliar or particularly difficult question appears in a paper, students with a deep understanding will be more able to adapt than students who have just been 'taught to the exam.'

Outside tutoring and Maths, I enjoy indoor rock climbing, cooking, playing piano, visiting new places, going on walks and reading.