Psychometric & Aptitude Test Coaching | RAF CBAT, Navy DAA, Army AOSB, UCAT, Fast Stream & Custom Psychometric Tests | Ex-Lecturer, Banker & Engineer

Find out more about Harjot

• When did you develop an interest in your chosen field and in private tutoring?

  Maths came first, long before teaching did. I trained as an engineer and later worked as a government bank manager and in both jobs I was doing quick mental calculations under pressure all day. That's where I stopped seeing maths as a school subject and started seeing it as a tool.
  The tutoring came sideways. While preparing for competitive exams myself, I have sat and cleared 12 of them, including NDA and AFCAT, friends started asking me how I was getting through papers so fast. I would show them the maths and aptitude shortcuts I was using and watch the penny drop. That reaction is what got me hooked. I have been teaching for over ten years now.

• Tell us more about the subject you teach, the topics you like to discuss with students (and possibly those you like a little less).

  I teach maths across 11+, SATs, GCSE and A-Level, plus aptitude and selection tests which include RAF CBAT, Navy DAA, Army AOSB, UCAT, Civil Service Fast Stream and graduate psychometrics.
  My favourite thing to teach is mental arithmetic shortcuts. Dividing by 1.4 in your head, squaring numbers in the fifties in one second, the 13 times table in ten seconds. Students think it's a party trick until they realise it's buying them four minutes in an exam.
  What I like less is teaching anything as a memorised procedure. If a student can only do a question because they have remembered the steps, they will fall apart the moment the question is worded differently. I would rather spend the time on why it works.

• Did you have any role models, a teacher who inspired you?

  He cleared five competitive exams and he passed the last one after he was married when I was seven or eight. So he was juggling a family and a full life while still chasing his dream of becoming an engineer. He got there.
  He also had an enormous store of maths tricks and shortcuts and I picked most of them up from him as a kid, long before I understood why they worked. A lot of what I teach now traces back to sitting with him at that age.

• What do you think are the qualities required to be a good tutor?

  Patience, mainly. And the discipline not to move on until the student has actually got it, rather than until you have finished explaining it. Those are different things and a lot of teaching confuses them.
  The other one is diagnosis. Most students who are struggling are not bad at the subject, there is usually a point further back where the logic stopped making sense and everything built on top of it has felt shaky ever since. A good tutor finds that point instead of just drilling whatever topic is in front of them.

• Provide a valuable anecdote related to your subject or your days at school.

  I still remember getting 50 out of 100 in a maths exam when I was eleven. I was devastated. It hurt more than a bad mark normally would because all I wanted was to be as good at maths as my father.
  He didn't let me sit in it. He talked to me patiently and then we got to proper hard work but smart work too, using the shortcuts and methods he had been teaching me since I was small.
  Two years later I scored 92 out of 100. After that my friends started calling me the maths master and I ended up being the one they came to for the difficult topics (differentiation, probability, etc) all the things people got stuck on.
  That's really where the teaching started and it's why I don't believe any student is weak. I was the kid scoring 50. I just needed someone to show me how.

• What were the difficulties or challenges you faced or are still facing in your subject?

  The biggest one is that most people arrive believing they are just not a maths person. That belief does more damage than any missing topic and undoing it takes longer than teaching the content.
  The other challenge is speed. Plenty of students know the maths but run out of time in the exam, which looks identical to not knowing it when the results come back. Teaching someone to be fast is a completely different job from teaching them to be correct and most tutoring ignores it.

• Do you have a particular passion? Is it teaching in general, an element of the subject, or something completely different?

  The moment something clicks. That's the whole thing for me. There is a specific look a student gets when a method they have been fighting suddenly makes sense and I have never got tired of it.
  Outside sessions I make short maths videos, the tricks schools never teach, everyday maths that nobody points out. Explaining something to camera in thirty seconds forces you to be much clearer than explaining it in thirty minutes and it has made me a better tutor.

• What makes you a Superprof?

  I am not a maths graduate who went straight into teaching. I have been a university lecturer, a bank manager and an engineer and I have personally sat and passed 12 competitive exams. So when I teach exam technique, it's from having been on the other side of the desk under real pressure, not from a textbook.
  And I don't believe in weak students. My whole approach is built on the idea that no student is weak, they just need the right mentor. Nearly every student I have worked with was capable all along, they just had a gap nobody had bothered to find.