The school year has just started, and your child probably has a new math teacher. That is the only thing that has changed.
If your child does the same things inside and outside of class that they did last year, they will end up with roughly the same grade and roughly the same understanding. A new teacher does not change that. New habits do.
After 32 years in a mathematics classroom, these are the five that make the biggest difference. None of them requires extra money or a tutor. All of them require somebody at home to keep asking.
Ask the same question every day
Every afternoon, ask your child this: what new concept or skill did you learn in math today?
The answer should be something they could not do when they walked into the room and could do when they walked out. A new fact. A new procedure. One thing.
The real value here is not the answer. It is what happens during the lesson. A student who knows that question is coming starts listening for something worth reporting. That turns a repetitive or slow lesson into a hunt for the one useful thing in it, and there is almost always one useful thing.
Practise until it is boring
A new procedure is not learned when your child gets it right once. It is learned when it has become repetitive, predictable, and easy.
Most textbooks do not give enough problems for that. Three examples and six exercises will not make anything automatic. Getting to easy takes more repetition than the book plans for, and it takes some grit to keep going after the first correct answer.
So find more problems. Another textbook, a website, or an AI tool that will generate practice with worked solutions. The source matters less than the volume. What you are looking for is the moment your child sighs and says this is boring now. That sigh is the goal.
"What you are looking for is the moment your child sighs and says this is boring now. That sigh is the goal."
Fix the materials problem
This sounds too basic to mention, and I mention it because I see it every single day.
Students turn up to mathematics without the equipment to do mathematics. No notebook. One pen. Nothing to mark a diagram with.
A notebook, pencils in two or three colours, a couple of highlighters, and the rest of the class supply list should be treated as required equipment, not optional extras. This is still true in high school. Colour matters more than people expect in mathematics, because so much of the subject is about seeing which parts of a diagram or an equation belong together.
Book one tutoring session early, before anything goes wrong
Not because your child is behind. Because of what it does to the relationship.
A student who has sat one on one with their teacher for twenty minutes stops being nervous around them. Questions get asked in class that would not have been asked before.
It changes things on the teacher's side too. After a tutoring session, that teacher has a stake in your child's success. They notice them. They stop at their desk. They direct questions their way. I have watched this happen from the front of the room for three decades, and I have never seen it fail.
Make the teacher a human being
Give your child a friendly assignment from you: find out a few things about your math teacher. Do they have children? What did they do before teaching? What do they do at weekends?
A student who sees their teacher as a person, rather than as the source of the homework, behaves differently in that room. They ask for help sooner. They take a bad grade as information rather than as a judgment. And a teacher who is known by a student tends to reach further to help them.
None of these five habits is complicated. What they have in common is that they all happen outside the lesson, which is exactly where the difference between a B and an A gets made.
Daniel Brink, Ph.D.
Daniel has 32 years of experience teaching mathematics at every level, including 11 years at one of South Africa's leading academic high schools. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from the University of Georgia and has trained thousands of teachers through his online programs. He built freepracticesat.com to give every student access to the same diagnostic first approach used by the best tutors.