Admissions · Fit

There is a particular kind of mind this was built for.

If you have a child who is clearly able and just as clearly not being reached, this page is where you find out whether I am the right person. It describes the student the teaching is built around, what changes when the teaching finally fits, and — further down, honestly — the situations where I would send you elsewhere.

01 / Recognition

You will probably recognise them in the first two lines.

01

They can hold an entire system in their head and lose the sheet of paper it was written on.

02

They ask the question the lesson was designed to walk around, and they ask it in front of everyone.

03

They will work six hours on something that has caught them, and cannot begin twenty minutes of something that has not.

04

They see the shortcut before they have been taught the long way, and get marked down for not showing the steps.

05

They are funnier about their own mind than most adults manage to be about theirs.

06

When something is finally explained at the level they actually think at, you can see the relief from across the room.

Note to self

None of this is a fault to correct. It is a description of a mind that has not yet been bent out of shape, and most of my work is making sure it is not.

02 / What changes

What it looks like when the teaching finally fits.

The first thing that comes back is usually not the grade. It is the willingness to try something in front of another person without checking their face first. A student who has spent two years being told they are bright but not applying themselves has learned that thinking out loud is dangerous. Undoing that takes a few weeks, and everything else follows it.

Then the work gets faster, because it stops being repetition. We build the reasoning at the level the student actually thinks at, which is usually well above the exercise in front of them, and the exercise becomes easy on the way past. In the students I have taught, parents tend to notice it in an odd order: the homework arguments stop before the report card moves.

A student said it this way

“My grades have improved, and I’m even starting to enjoy math!”

Eva · Student, one year of tutoring

03 / Signals

What tends to be true before a family writes.

Nobody writes on a good week. These are the six situations families describe most often — you do not need all of them, and most people recognise two.

01

The gap between what the student can clearly do and what appears on the report card has stopped being explainable.

02

More than one tutor has already been tried, and the sessions turned into supervised homework within a month.

03

The student is bored and behind at the same time, which no one at school seems able to hold as a single idea.

04

There is a diagnosis, or a strong suspicion of one, and nothing about the teaching has changed as a result.

05

The student has started saying they are stupid, about a subject they were fluent in two years ago.

06

University has arrived and the quantitative modules have exposed gaps that school never had to test.

On this list

This is not a checklist to score. It is what families tell me, in their own words, usually before anyone has said the word twice-exceptional out loud.

04 / Scope

Ages and subjects.

Secondary school

Mathematics and statistics, from the point where the subject stops being arithmetic and starts demanding reasoning. Work on the student's own syllabus, whichever curriculum they sit.

University

Statistics, econometrics and research methods, including the conceptual side of SPSS, Stata and R. For students who can run the command and cannot yet defend the choice.

Everything is online

One to one over video, with an iPad as a shared working surface so the reasoning stays visible rather than dictated. No in-person teaching.

Where students are

Europe, Canada and the United States. Timetabling is agreed at the start of each term rather than rescheduled week by week.

05 / Not a fit

And when I will say no.

Four situations where I am the wrong call. None of them is a judgement of the student, and in each case there is someone better than me for the job. Saying so early is part of the service.

What is needed is an assessment or a diagnosis. That is clinical work, and it belongs with a psychologist.

The exam is in three weeks and the syllabus has not been started. Cramming is a real service; it is not this one.

The student does not want to be here. I can work with reluctance, but not with a decision made entirely by someone else.

What is wanted is someone to complete the assignments. Work submitted for assessment has to be the student’s own.

06 / Next step

Not sure? That is the normal state.

Almost nobody arrives certain. If you have read this far, something on this page has probably described your child more precisely than the last three conversations you have had about them — and that is usually signal enough to write. A few paragraphs describing the situation is all I need. You will get a real answer either way, and if the answer is that someone else is better placed, I will tell you who.

Serenella Muradore Gallas

Selective one-to-one tutoring for gifted, ADHD and twice-exceptional students, built over years rather than semesters.

Educational support, not clinical care. I do not diagnose, assess, or provide therapy.