How to Actually Study gcse Maths

So GCSE mocks are approaching either in November or in January and I get asked a lot, how do I actually study maths, what resources do I use etc etc and I get asked this from students at work and also during tuition. So I'm going to show you exactly what I tell students to do and what I recommend they do and the good news is it's really really simple. It's not easy but it's really really basic in terms of the idea of what you need to do. I'm just going to give you some motivation for this as well. So let's just jump straight into it. Essentially this is how you learn maths. That's it. You find a question or topic you can't do and then you learn how to do it, period. However, I get a lot of pushback from students when they come across this. So if I give them a past paper and I say, cool, find a question in there, learn how to do it. I get some pushback about like, how do I actually do that? And then they have questions about grades and all that stuff. So I'm going to go through a few things. The first thing I want to say is you need to ignore the grade levels. So, for example, completing the square is grade nine, but it's actually not that difficult. it really isn't i think that anyone can actually learn it but also if you're doing the higher paper you're going to have grade seven eight and nine topics in there even if you're only aiming for a grade five or a grade six this would be like going into a biology paper and then not memorizing stuff about photosynthesis because you don't like the topic it'll be idiotic right you have to cover the grade seven to nine content even if you're not aiming for it because that still counts towards your grade it just does right and you don't want to miss out on getting that grade six or grade seven because you didn't learn completing the square and that cost you the number of marks so I don't want you asking or even looking up what grade a certain topic is because it's completely irrelevant it doesn't mean anything because you're doing the higher paper you have to know how to do it it's going to be on your paper so anyways PMT past papers are really really good I don't necessarily recommend learning topics through but actually learning individual topic questions and stuff like that I will show you where to get those but genuinely at this stage in year 11 you know or you have covered almost all of the content for year 11 maths so you're going to use PMT past papers if you run out of those which I doubt I'm going to show you on the next screen how many paper ones there are just by themselves you can also look at all the papers as well there's also practice sets as well on another website that I'll send to you also and practice sets there are 30 sets of papers paper one two and three so it's 90 papers right there there's also been 20 something papers 20 something past papers mock papers all sorts of stuff and the good news is okay let's say you get to a question that you think okay i'm not sure how to do this well there's tons of solutions online right like people have written up model answers people have made videos i've made videos going through these questions like you will be able to find out how to do it but in the worst case, you can use AI to explain it to you. So take a picture of the question, ask ChatGPT and say, I'm a year 11 student, I don't get this question, can you explain this to me like I'm a year 11 student? And it would give you a decent description. This is also where your teachers and tutors will also come in very handily, because they can help you if, you know, you've exhausted all these previous resources, maybe someone at school or your personal tutor can help you with that. And of course i've made grade seven to nine topics for everything right i've literally done hundreds of questions that are grade seven to nine and explain them i've also done topic videos and things like vectors and completing the square so you can also look at that just go on my channel playlist grade nine done there's like 30 something videos easy enough and i know it's called grade nine but remember if you aim if you try if you work as if you're trying to get a grade nine you will get a grade seven or eight at least right so yeah that kind of covers that this by the way is just for paper one on PMT. That's all the papers they have. There are also 30 sets of practice papers they don't have on here which is on a separate website which I'm going to leave in the description as well. Video solutions, model answers, go on YouTube type in November 2021 paper one walkthrough and you'll find a thousand YouTubers that have gone through it in the past. I've gone through a lot of these as well. The next tip is to do maths regularly not necessarily doing a lot. So what does that mean? Well I know some students that will do maths once or twice a week but they do five or six hours. Cool, like, that's good, but instead, if you do maths every single day for 30 minutes, that's actually better, even though if you actually do the maths quickly, 30 minutes every single day is actually a lot less time than five hours twice a week. Maths is one of those core subjects, but it's also a skill, unlike other subjects. Most other subjects you get by by memorization. You'd learn a lot of facts. Maths is a skill, so it's like if you're trying to learn the piano or learn how to ride a bike or learn how to speak another language it's not memory it's about how much practice you do and it's about changing the way you think so most of the marks that people lose aren't actually due to topics they're due to how to apply those topics they're due to the problem solving that only comes if you do maths regularly and you really think about it whilst you're doing it so i'd recommend doing maths almost every single day but doing perhaps less of it instead yeah good news is you have maths lessons at school right so at least that covers part of it but again you probably want if you want to do those two days let's say you have maths on Tuesday and Thursday at school you want to do something on like Saturday and maybe Monday or something like that as well yeah just a single word description the other problem that students have is they treat maths like one of the other subjects in English you can memorize a bunch of grade 9 essays and get a grade 7 to 9 in geography and history you can memorize a bunch of stuff and get a really good grade. That does not work in maths because there's an infinite number of questions they can ask you. They can change numbers, they can change situations, they can do all sorts of stuff. That's what costs students the grade nine, by the way. They know all of the content really well, but they don't have a deep understanding of it. And so inevitably, when they get a question where they throw a curveball at you, they can't do any of it. So instead, when you're doing this, what's the most important thing? Okay, let's say you're doing a completing the square question. You see where the numbers go, okay, perfect. Do you understand, for example, so, okay, part A is do complete the square, part B says, write the coordinates of the turning point. Do you understand what that even means? What's a turning point? Why does that give you the turning point? These things are important because there've been questions in a GCSE paper saying, write down the minimum value of a quadratic. Show that this quadratic is always positive. Well, the only way to do that is by understanding what a turning point is. And so you have to really understand what's going on. That is the most important thing. What happens if you don't understand? well again youtube ai teachers tutors ask talk learn right use your friends as well because i guarantee you there'll be questions that you understand that they don't and that they understand you don't use that it's a collaborative experience so really focus on this understanding because once again maths is a skill there is a reason why maths teachers can come back after 10 years of not doing gcse maths and still do gcse maths because memory wouldn't last 10 years but your understanding will so keep that in mind when you're doing this those are my basic tips once again i'm going to leave the link to the pmt stuff although you could just find that yourself and i'm going to leave a link to the other website where it has once again like 30 sets of practice papers it has mock papers has everything and all of these things are produced by Edexcel so they are exam papers and you can use them but a lot of people say they want to save exam papers till the end you do not have enough time to do all of these. I guarantee if you started now you will not finish all of the exam papers by the time of your exam. So start now, do it now, learn, understand, grow.