Before your first session
Bring one real thing you are stuck on. Not a representative example — the actual one, ideally the one that is annoying you at the kitchen table on a school night.
You do not need to have prepared anything or read ahead. Starting from genuine confusion works better than starting from a tidy summary.
What will feel strange at first
You will ask a question and get a question back. For the first few exchanges this is mildly infuriating, and that reaction is worth naming rather than pushing through silently.
The reason it works is that the answer you would have been given is forgettable within a day. The answer you construct is not.
The three mistakes almost everyone makes
- Answering too quickly. The first answer is usually the remembered one. The useful one arrives about ten seconds later.
- Treating "I don't know" as failure. It is the most efficient answer available and it moves things forward faster than a guess.
- Stopping at the correct answer. That a finished worksheet means the work was understood is the single most common way progress stalls without anyone noticing.
A starter routine
Fifteen minutes is enough. Pick one idea, answer the opening question honestly — What part of this already makes sense to you? — and go three follow-ups deep before you look anything up.
Then do the part that does the work: working a problem aloud, then explaining the reasoning to someone else without notes.
When to move on
You are ready for the advanced guide when the student starts asking their own next question before being prompted — not when you have covered a certain number of topics.
Until then, repetition on fewer ideas beats coverage of more.