In the past, the only real thing I’ve prioritsed as a metric for whether or not I should move past a topic with any of my students has been understanding – how clearly they’ve been able to demonstrate to me that they understand how to work out a certain type of question and how thoroughly they can explain to me their thought process while doing so.

I noticed one of my Year 8 Maths students yesterday really savouring the working out part of a few questions in a row that I knew he had figured out the answer to long before he put it down on paper. He was adding more steps than he needed to in his working, because he was clearly just deriving so much pleasure from the actual process – when your student is humming songs and tap dancing while answering questions correctly, it really is a beautiful things to see. When you’re good at something and it makes sense to you, it can be very enjoyable to take your time.

And I’m all for enjoying the process. But, the reality of Maths is that in exams (because you know, they kind of matter) we don’t have the luxury of unlimited time. If you’re doing multiple steps because they’re integral to your working out process, that’s different. But, when I saw my student unnecessarily simplifying fractions in his head on the way to his answer instead of just punching it all into the calculator (taking 3 lines of working to do what could very well be done in 1), I felt it necessary to pull him up and explain to him the following:

Once the stuff makes sense, our next priority is moving more efficiently.

The faster we can get to our answer by trimming the fat off of our working – cutting out unnecessary steps, the better. We save our mental bandwidth for tougher questions coming up ahead and allow ourselves more time to come back and check our working out later on.

I know personally how easy it can be to derive so much enjoyment from a process that you almost completely forget what the end goal is, but I feel it our obligation as tutors to keep our students in check and prioritise what is in their best interests in the grand scheme of things, at all times.

We can have fun doing maths and work on moving faster through our questions (once the stuff makes sense), all at the same time.

Thanks for reading 😀

Thomas Koutavas