My name is Janice. You might recognise me as a "Super Tutor" featured by the local and overseas media.
My love for teaching young children was evident since the day I joined the profession.
Prior to founding Concept Math, I was a primary school teacher for ten years.
During that period, my passion and dedication towards education won me multiple awards from the Ministry of Education (MOE) including the prestigious School Caring Teacher, Outstanding Contribution Awards. I also received a Rotary Gold Medal from National Institute of Education (NIE, NTU) for outstanding leadership and dedication to student activities.
With such stellar results, you might naturally assume I had never struggle in Math. This is quite far from the truth. Part of what makes me a good Math tutor is the struggles that I went through and the success of hard work.
Will you be surprised if I tell you that as a child, Math was my worst subject and once I even got as low as a 4 out of 100? That was a mere 4%!!
I found Math boring. I hated the repetitive drills – memorising time table, long division and I was particularly weak in problem sums!
Along the way, I figured Math out. "Practise does NOT make Perfect". Math is about understanding of concepts and applying the appropriate heuristics for problem solving, in a systematic manner. This is central to the S.M.A.R.T. approach that I developed.
I chose to further my studies in Math and graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with a major in Mathematics.
Fast forward till today, teaching Math has become a part of my life and I continue to want to every child discover the Math genius in themselves!
My childhood experience was the reason why I chose to teach Math to young children. I'm an effective Math tutor because I struggled immensely with the concepts I now thoroughly understand. I can help my students better because I was in their shoes!
In my 20-over years as an educator, I have seen so many children feeling frustrated and stressed because a weak foundation in Math pulls down their overall grades resulting in low self-esteem and robbing these young children from a place in their dream Secondary Schools.
The scary thing is, the tell-tale signs of a weak foundation in Math do not show up in Primary 1 or 2. At lower Primary, school exams test basic competencies such as simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with small numbers below 100. How difficult can this be?
Therefore, children tend to do well in P1 and P2, easily scoring 80-90%, even FULL MARKS, which led parents to think that they are coping well... and a weak foundation might go undetected.