Advice for pseudo-grinds

dave_eire

Hi guys,

Looking for a bit of advice.

A cousin of mine has just completed him junior cert and gone into 4th year. he has been having trouble with the Maths curriculum specifically trig and algebra, and I have offered to help him catch up over this year so he is in better shape for starting 5th year. He took pass maths, and I would like to be able to go over the course with him to ensure that he has a proper understanding of this before getting completely lost in 5th year. While I understand that getting professional grinds from someone who is familiar with the curriculum would be better, he is a shy lads and gets very embarrassed around other people when he doesn’t know what is going on.

I am a software developer and studied maths in college, so I have a good grasp of the subject, but it has been 12 years since I sat the leaving and not only have I forgotten what topics were covered, I believe the curriculum has recently been changed.

I was wondering if anyone know are there any books out there aimed at say parents trying to help their kids which I could buy, or any other resources which might help me. If such resources do not exist, what would you recommend I do? Just get a copy of his school books and go through them and then once I am happy I understand the topics, sit down and go through them with him.

Any advice or pointers will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks a lot,

DaveH.

carl_

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!

LeixlipRed

The "Text & Tests" series of books cover the whole secondary school maths syllabus and are vey well written. In combination with the JC past papers you should easily have enough info in there to go through everything he needs. The poster above's approach to teaching low level maths is one that I'd follow too. Plenty of questions (the papers are idntical year to year) and some minor understanding of what's happening in each area and he'll be well able for it

dave_eire

Thanks a lot for your help and advice!

D