Twenty-eight years of teaching one subject properly.
I am a mathematics teacher. That is the whole of it. I read Mathematics at the National University of Singapore, taught in an MOE school, and have spent the decades since working out what actually makes a student good at this subject.
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Client asset pendingFrom the idea outward.
I teach Secondary and Junior College mathematics, and I teach it one way: from the idea outward.
Most students arrive with procedures. They know how to complete the square, how to apply the chain rule, how to set out a hypothesis test. What they often cannot do is say why any of it is true — and that is the part the examination is quietly testing.
Over twenty-eight years I have taught more than two thousand students. The ones who do well are rarely the ones who sat the most practice papers. They are the ones who stopped needing to be told which method to use.
A procedure has nothing underneath it.
For most of my career I taught the way I was taught: define the method, demonstrate it, drill it. It produces results for students who are already comfortable, and it quietly fails the ones who are not — because a student who has memorised a procedure has no way to recover when the procedure does not fit.
What changed my teaching was marking. When you read thousands of scripts, the same failure appears again and again: the student recognises the question type, reaches for the memorised procedure, and finds the paper has changed the question slightly. The procedure no longer applies, and there is nothing underneath it to fall back on.
So I began teaching from the idea outward. Why the discriminant is what it is. Why the factor theorem must work. Why a derivative measures a rate before it measures a gradient. A student who can derive a result can use it in whatever form the examiner chooses. A student who memorised it can only use the form they were shown.
Marks are lost in predictable places.
I examine for both the IB and Cambridge, and I lead workshops for IB teachers. Two things follow from that.
The first is precision about marks. I know how a mark scheme is built, where the method marks sit, and where students lose marks they had already earned — the missing justification, the unstated domain, the answer left in the wrong form. Much of my teaching is about closing the distance between what a student understands and what an examiner is able to credit.
The second is a certain scepticism about cleverness. Examiners are not looking for brilliance. They are looking for evidence of understanding, presented clearly enough to be credited. That is a skill in its own right, and it can be taught.
Where the craft was learned.
I taught in a MOE school before moving into full-time tuition. Those years are where the teaching was actually learned: how to explain the same idea five different ways until one lands, how to read a student's silence, how to keep a lesson moving without leaving anyone behind.
Since then I have taught over two thousand students across the O-Level, Integrated Programme, A-Level and IB. I have also worked as a consultant on Extended Essays and Internal Assessments, which is where mathematics stops being a matter of method and becomes a matter of judgement.
Prepared for one student at a time.
Lessons are one-to-one or in small groups, at the student's home or online over Zoom and iPad.
- One-to-one private tuition — the lesson follows the student's gaps, not a fixed syllabus pace.
- Small group classes — two to four students working at a compatible level.
- Crash courses ahead of the June, September and October examinations.
- At your home, or online. In-person lessons are taught at the student's home; online lessons use Zoom with an iPad for handwritten working.
- No make-up lessons. Each lesson is prepared for the specific student in front of me, which makes rescheduling someone else's lesson a poor substitute for the one that was missed.
In list form.
- Bachelor of Science (Honours), Mathematics — National University of Singapore
- Former MOE teacher
- Twenty-eight years of teaching experience
- Over 2,000 students taught across O-Level, IP, A-Level and IB
- IB Diploma examiner
- IB workshop leader
- Cambridge examiner
- Concept-based Instruction instructor
- Extended Essay and Internal Assessment consultant
In their words.
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“A short quote from a past student or parent will sit here.”
“A short quote from a past student or parent will sit here.”
“A short quote from a past student or parent will sit here.”
Start with a conversation.
Tell me the level, the paper, and what is currently getting in the way. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right fit.