There is a difference between knowing a formula and understanding why it is true. Between following steps and seeing what the steps are actually doing. Between solving the problem on page 47 — because you have practised problems exactly like it — and solving a problem you have never seen before, because you understand the principle underneath.
Most mathematics education produces the first kind of student: one who can perform the familiar, and freezes when the unfamiliar arrives. That is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of method.
Anyone can create magic with math.
A magician understands a principle so deeply that what they do looks impossible to those who don’t. Every mathematician, physicist, chemist and economist is a magician in exactly this sense — not because they are rare, but because they were taught to see.
A student should feel a concept before naming it. The formula arrives as a relief — a short name for something the student already understands.
Abstract drill trains performance. Real problems build thinking.
Reasoning solves problems nobody has written a recipe for yet.
Confusion before clarity is not a problem to be solved. It is the learning itself.
Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Economics, from the first steps to university. Each lecture takes one idea and explains why it is true, where it comes from and how to use it, with diagrams you can move and questions that check you as you go.
No account, no payment, no catch. 80 lectures are ready to read today, and new ones are added every week.
Every live course is taught by me, online, to a small group. A group opens when four students are ready, and each course is paid for once, with nothing further to pay.
Real problems don’t come with an equation. Two courses — one finds rules, one makes them — with a new problem every session.
Deep Dives · pre-university and beyondOne subject, taken properly: Calculus, Statistics, Physics, Organic Chemistry or Economics, from first principles.
One-to-one, occasionally. $70 an hour, a few places a year. Write to me.
I have been helping students qualify for competitive examinations in India for fifteen years. I have taught students in Thailand, Canada, the USA and Singapore, across every board from IGCSE to the IB Diploma to engineering mathematics.
If you are finding a subject tough, it does not mean the subject is tough. It means you have not yet met a teacher who loves it.
Tell me the student’s year and what they think about the subject right now. I will tell you honestly which course is worth their time, or whether none of them is.