About

Master Your Math

Master Your Math was founded in 2016 when after years of teaching at other tuition center and also doing home tuition, I got increasingly frustrated with two problems.

1. Too many tuition center try to generalise and teach as many subjects as possible. From a profit making viewpoint, this isn’t surprising. Teaching as many subjects as possible allows the tuition center to enroll more students, which (most of the time) leads to higher profits. But a core problem with this approach was that frequently, the tuition center will be spreading its resources, and hence, the quality of teaching suffers. I was employed at multiple tuition center before- their expectation of me was to teach well across a wide domain of subjects. Now pause for a moment and think about it- if you were looking for someone to operate on your brain, will you find a brain surgeon, or a general practitioner? The answer is obvious in this context, but this problem is less prominent for teaching; that is, it is extremely hard for teachers to teach multiple subjects, and excel at teaching all of the subjects required. What this implies is that most tuition center (and private tutors) end up providing sub-par services- only teaching at a 50% competence level when they can be teaching at 100% competence level. Master Your Math was founded to combat this problem- over here at Master Your Math, I focus on one and only one subject- GCSE O Levels Additional Mathematics. Many students have approached me for other subjects, but my response has always been the same- no, I do not teach other subjects, and I will not teach other subjects until I feel that I’ve mastered how to teach Additional Mathematics. This means that all of my teaching time are spent on preparing Additional Mathematics materials. Hundreds of hours have gone into preparing all my materials, be it my notes, worksheets, or cheat sheet. I’ve done up the answers to the question of my worksheets myself, often not relying on provided answers. The rationale is simple- I believe the best way to get into the mind of my students is to be a student myself. As I do the questions, I learn what it is like to solve those questions, and the problems that my students may encounter. With this experience, when actual class time arrives, I can provide a superior learning experience for my students than other tuition center which just provides their teachers with answer keys.
   

   My working for a trigonometry question to get a better sense of what the question feels like for my student

2. Many tuition center (and also schools) prepare their students well for the basic level of questions. However, they fail to prepare the students adequately for the higher level difficulty questions. This means that students are often under the impression of false competence (being better than they really are). This facade crumbles when students step into the exam hall, face the actual questions, then realize that they aren’t as good as they think they are. This was a problem that I often face while teaching at other tuition center- the materials may have been photocopied from other assessment books, and then the students were expected to be able to do well for exams. This is evidently very hard when one doesn’t train the students enough for the tough questions. Master Your Math overcome this problem by having all the questions from my topical worksheets coming from actual exam questions. This means that right off the bat, my students will be working on actual exam questions. When exam rolls around, my students will be adequately prepared, having worked sufficiently on these tough questions. This also gives me students greater confidence- if they can get by my lessons, they can definitely ace their exams.

Teaching methodology

With these two issues in mind, I set out to refine the learning experience of my students. At the core of my teaching methodology lies three principles:

1. Distilled notes that tell the students what are essential. In school, the students are often required to purchase thick textbooks, and this is understandable. Students have to learn the minute details of each concept, and also work on practice questions included in these textbooks. However, from my own experience, there exists 2 problems with such textbooks if they are used for intensive learning purpose.The first is that many students who look for tuition are already relatively weak in the subject. Using textbooks or assessment books out there in the market often discourages students from diving into the subject, simply because the breadth and difficulty make Additional Mathematics feel like an insurmountable challenge. The second is that they are often not concise enough, and students cannot rely on these textbooks for last minute studying.From my own experience, I realised that many of the questions in exams can be solved with a few key skills. Hence, I’ve created my notes with this in mind- giving my students these few key skills, and then linking them to the topics to teach them how to solve the problems.
2. Extensive practice on actual exam questions. I will not explain more about this as I’ve already elaborated above. Do note that 100% of my topical worksheets’ questions are actual exam questions.
3. Short feedback loop. In my lessons, I aim to have as short feedback loops as possible. What this means is that I will try to cover the smallest sub-topic possible (learn enough to solve a certain type of question). Upon doing this, I will immediately move on to the practice questions so that my students can check their level of understanding. For some students, this may mean that they realise they do not understand the topic as well as they thought they did. Not to worry, this means that we’ve saved time by not fiddling around, but instead, we can go straight to the misconceptions. Through this short feedback loop, my students see Additional Mathematics as a subject that can be broken down into “easily digestible” pieces, and I’ve seen their results improve accordingly.

In summary, Master Your Math was founded to solve actual problems in today’s tuition industry. Much more importantly, you can be assured that when you decide to enroll either yourself or your child under my service, you’re investing in the highest quality education service. You’re investing in a specialist who has spent at least hundreds of hours on this project, and will continue to sharpen his skills and materials to ensure continual growth in your child’s learning experience. In fact, Master Your Math has 100% 5 stars reviews on its Facebook page, a testament to the quality of teaching.

 

Poh Jie, founder of Master Your Math

I understand that there are so many tuition center and private tutors out there to choose from. In fact, choosing a qualified tuition center/teacher for your child can be one of the most vexing experience, with so little known but so much at stakes. Here’s a little background about myself to help you better understand why I am the right fit for your child:

• I’ve scored 270/300 for my PSLE in 2006. Credit has to go to my parents. As I come from a lower middle income family, I am extremely grateful that my father had worked hard to provide me with the money to receive additional education services. My mother, as a housewife, also had to send  and fetch me to these tuition places.
• I know how it feels to do badly for my studies, then go on to still succeed academically. I did very badly for my first A Levels, scoring only 3 Cs and 2 Ds. I remember applying for Singapore Management University, and promptly getting rejected even before the application window had closed. I decided to redo my A Levels, and finally scoring a rank point of 85.5/90 to get into Computer Science at National University of Singapore, a highly sought after course.
• I am in First Class Honors Band at NUS. This is a result of extremely hard work, and constant refinements to my study techniques to ensure that I can do as well as possible.

Here are some proofs of my academic accomplishments:

Doing well at both A Levels and SAT 1 and 2.

• I have 5 years worth of experience teaching tuition, having taught at both tuition centers and as a home tutor.
• I always go the extra mile for my students, answering questions that they have, such as schoolwork questions or even dishing out general academic advice:
  

  Answering a student’s query on her school work.

  

  Giving study techniques advice

• And, if you haven’t done so already, please take a moment to head over to Master Your Math’s Facebook site to read the actual 5 stars reviews written by my actual students. I just asked them to speak their mind and I am grateful for the amount of love they’ve shown.

So what are you waiting for? Drop me an email at masteryourmathsg@gmail.com to sign up for my lessons, or simply download my cheat sheet for free to take a look at my materials!