After teaching math students over hundreds of hours, I’ve realised that success in maths has much less to do with talent and more to do with the problem attacking mindset and approach. In my experience, most students don’t struggle because they are naturally “bad at maths”, rather, they can often struggle because they’ve lost their confidence. As cliche as it sounds, once you start believing you can improve, I have witnessed students getting everything easier. Throughout my time tutoring, I have also learned that there’s no single right way to understand or learn a topic, some people need diagrams, others need analogies, and sometimes it takes a mix of both. Practice works best when it’s focused and attuned, most notably the strategy I end up using most often is finding a way it could relate to real life. I also found that not just doing dozens of random questions, but instead identifying where you went wrong and fixing that part goes a long way too. Progress isn’t always straight onwards and upwards either; you might hit a plateau (or horizontal asymptote), and that’s completely normal. What matters most is consistency and celebrating small wins along the way. Every time you finally get a question right or understand something that confused you before, that is the real progress. The truth is, anyone can get better at maths – it just takes patience, curiosity, and a willingness to keep trying, even when it feels tough.

Starsky