Why we don't drill — and what we do instead

If you've ever bought a worksheet pack for your child — or seen one on Instagram — you'll recognise the pattern: 50 problems, one per line, fill them in.

It looks like learning. It feels productive. It does almost nothing for understanding.

Why drilling doesn't work

Worksheets train pattern recognition, not thinking. A child who does 50 long-division problems gets faster at long division. They don't get better at solving novel problems.

They also get bored, frustrated, and resistant. Worksheets are a quick path to "I hate maths."

What we do instead

Our sessions look like conversations. The tutor sits beside the child and asks questions.

"What are you trying to find?"

"What do you already know?"

"Can you draw it?"

"What's another way you could solve this?"

The child does the work. The tutor guides, but doesn't solve. We treat every wrong answer as useful information about what to revisit.

It looks slow. It isn't.

A child who learns this way is slower in the first few weeks. They make more mistakes. They ask more questions.

By week six, they're ahead of where they'd be with worksheets — because they can transfer what they've learned to problems they haven't seen before. That's the whole point of maths.

The parent voice

What we hear most from parents after a few months is something like: "He's not afraid of maths anymore." That's the test that matters. Everything else is downstream.