WHY DO SO MANY STUDENTS HAVE TROUBLE WITH MATH?

A+ Tutoring believes that the only reasonable way to learn math is to stick with each topic until it is understood.  The main reason so many children have trouble with math in school is that teachers are required to "cover" an enormous amount of material each year—which means moving on before many of the students understand it.  As a result, the students can't understand the next thing either, since it depends on the last.  Pretty soon, they are hopelessly lost.

"But," you might say, "if the teachers don't move on, they won't finish what they're supposed to, and year after year the children will get further and further behind!"

Not at all.  In the first place, students who don't understand the basics will never understand the higher level material.  Second, one of the major reasons that teachers are required to cover so much material is simple: Because so few children learn it the first time around, the teachers next year have to teach it all over again!

If it were taught right the first time, it wouldn't have to be repeated every year.

Spending extra time on the difficult material, making sure that students understand it, greatly decreases the total amount of material that has to be "covered."  Students will actually progress through math more quickly if the extra time is taken to make sure they learn each concept completely.

A+ Tutoring has developed its own, proprietary math curriculum, ordered in a step by step manner to ensure understanding.  We advise parents of elementary school children to consider having the tutor start from the most fundamental concepts, rather than with whatever topic is currently being taught in class.  They are unlikely to grasp the current concept, in any case, until the holes in their foundation knowledge are repaired.

For middle school students, the situation is more difficult.  Grades are becoming important, which means that it is more urgent to address the "current problem" directly. In the long term, this is less efficient; but grades matter in the short term. Nonetheless, we try to balance grade improvement with searching for holes in background knowledge.

For high school students it is more difficult still.  Grades have reached a level of importance where they begin to affect the rest of the students' lives.  Boosting the grade thus becomes the major concern at this point.  We realize, though, that this is probably impossible without a willingness to work backward to find the most significant foundational holes that are causing the current problem.

In all cases, A+ Tutoring responds to the needs of each particular student.  We do not have a "program" into which we try to fit all students, as if they were all the same.  We re-teach only those areas which are not properly understood.

For the topics taught at the various levels, see the curriculum matrix.