Advice for pseudo-grinds

I've only given a few little grinds here and there, so hopefully someone with more experience will get back to you, but for what it's worth, I believe that if you did some math in college and are somewhat interested in how to solve things, then you will need nothing more than the textbook he uses (unless it's really crap) and past papers.

This is Pass maths, so remember, most of the questions require very little novel thought - you can be pretty confident of covering all the bases by just being systematic. One approach I took with a student was to pick a topic, go through the material and questions in the textbook and then just do oodles of past paper questions on that area. It was always the same questions over and over and over.

Just be really systematic - break everything down. Make sure the student understands all of the terminology in the question so that he knows exactly what type of question it is. That really seems to mess people up by the way - students get quickly confused between 'solve', 'factor' etc.. so they often just stare at the question for ages. I then show them what was needed and they respond with "oh them.. they're easy!".

An 'A' is achievable by nearly everyone in Pass LC (I believe in honours too) if they are given 1-1 tuition. It's not ability that holds people back in this, it's lack of information, psychological hangups, etc. For example, I was giving grinds to one student who had a hangup on the trigonometric identity questions. Typically they involve a few basic algebraic manipulations/substitutions to prove some result.. but this student would just stare blankly at the page. So all I did was made sure he was used to the various pieces of algebra needed and then we basically played with the equations over and over until he got the hang of it. His problem was that he expected to be able to see all the steps necessary before putting pen to paper!