University maths tutoring

Almost nobody on this page chose maths. It arrived attached to something else: an economics degree, engineering, biology, psychology, a medical course with statistics bolted on. That matters, because it means the people struggling with it are usually not people who struggle with things. They got into a selective programme, they are fine in their own subject, and failing this one module feels out of proportion and faintly personal. It is worth finding out what is actually broken before paying for a term of anything. In most cases it is not the new material. It is the school algebra underneath it: manipulating an expression without having to think about it, fractions with letters in them, index and log rules, rearranging a formula the right way round. The lecturer moves at the speed of somebody for whom all of that is automatic, so a gap there reads as not understanding integration when the integration was never the problem. If that is the diagnosis, a few sessions on the algebra will do more than a term of the lectures repeated slowly, and it costs less. If it genuinely is the new material, bring the real paperwork to the first lesson: the problem sheets, the lecturer's own notes, a past paper. University maths courses differ in notation and in which method they expect, more than the textbooks suggest, and a correct answer produced the way another faculty teaches it still loses marks.