Justin Tan

Online tuition removes travel and widens your choice of tutor. It also removes the tutor’s ability to see a child drift, and it asks the child to supply the self-regulation a physical room used to supply. For a self-managing teenager that trade is often clearly worth it. For a distractible eleven-year-old it frequently is not. […]

Science is the subject where a child most often knows the answer and does not get the mark. The marks go to three different failures — not knowing the content, not writing it in the form the mark scheme wants, or not transferring a known idea to an unfamiliar setup — and they need different

The real difference between one-to-one and group tuition is not price — it is who sets the pace. One-to-one follows your child’s reasoning and stops where they stop. Group follows a curriculum and moves whether or not your child is ready. Which is right depends entirely on whether your child’s problem is personal or shared.

Maths marks are lost in four distinct ways: the concept was never understood, the concept is understood but the method is wrong, the method is right but execution slips, or the question was never attempted. Only the first two are taught away. The other two need different fixes, and paying for teaching to solve them

In the O-Level year, exam technique, presentation and answer construction still move quickly. Deep content gaps and weak mathematical fluency move slowly. Allocating the remaining months by that distinction, rather than by which subject feels most alarming, is the single most useful thing a family can do in Secondary 4. The Sec 3 debt Most

Tuition price in Singapore is determined by three things: who is teaching, how many children are in the room, and what level is being taught. Results are not one of them. Once you can see which of the three you are paying a premium for, you can tell whether that premium is buying something your