Some of my students get assigned Maths homework in the form of online questions, where they must complete working out in their books (for example) and then enter a final answer digitally.

What’s neat about this is that we get immediate feedback on whether or not we got the question right. As tutors, it can be easy at certain times to feel like “there’s no way I could get this wrong,” especially with our younger students’ classwork. There was an instance yesterday, however, where I missed a tiny nuance in one of my student’s questions that changed its entire meaning. Because of this, the initial answer my student and I worked up (with my guidance) was completely wrong.

Had we been answering questions out of the textbook, there’s a great chance that we may have moved past this one without any second thought and onto the next. The fact that we were forced to confront the correct answer immediately turned out to be extremely valuable.

I know that with Maths textbooks it can somewhat laborious, flipping back and forth between the questions you’re doing and the answers, because most of the time they’re (what literally feels like) a ton of pages apart. What I like doing to make this easier is keeping two whiteboard markers that I’m not using as bookmarks at all times; one on the page of the questions we’re doing, and the other on the page of the corresponding answers. This way, we can flip back and forth between questions and answers effortlessly and ensure that we are answering every single question the right way.

Thomas Koutavas