We were sitting at the kitchen table, and I had just watched my daughter close her maths textbook with a little more force than usual. The thud was soft, but the message was clear. She had been trying to work through a Year 11 advanced algebra chapter on her own, and it wasn’t going well. She was fourteen, in Year 9, and we weren’t trying to get her ahead of her class. We were just trying to catch her up.
Earlier that year, we had moved interstate, and the school switch had thrown her off. Her new school was a third of the size, offering different electives and, crucially, a different maths pathway. She was behind in three core subjects—maths, English, and biology—not from a lack of try, but from a mismatch in curriculums. Her new teachers were supportive, but they were also bound by their own syllabuses. They couldn’t give her two months of private tuition during class time. So, I found myself sitting opposite her, hoping to help fill the gaps.
I had to find resources. Not to push her to some impossible standard, but just to make sure she could walk into a classroom and understand what was being asked of her. It felt like trying to build a three-lane highway from scratch, and I didn’t know where the road maps were.
Our first stop was the library, which felt old-fashioned, but it was a starting point. We borrowed a few study guides, the kind that promise “complete coverage” of the Australian Curriculum. They were dense. Reading them felt like staring at a wall. They were full of information, but there was no voice, no narrative. They were just facts on a page. It was hard for her to know what was worth focusing on and what she could skim. I remember her reading the same paragraph about cell division three times, her eyes glazing over. It wasn’t the right fit for us. We needed something that could explain why, not just what.
That was when I started watching Khan Academy with her, not just telling her to use it. I had heard of it before, but I had always pictured it as a lone video player. In reality, it was a structured course. We started with the Year 10 maths section, not Year 11 or 12. That was the first lesson I learned: we had to find where her actual knowledge ended, not where the textbook said it should be. When she couldn’t answer a question about linear functions, we didn’t skip it. We clicked back to Year 9 to watch a video on plotting graphs. It took us a week, but she finally understood the foundational piece that was making the Year 11 work impossible.
It wasn’t just the videos, though. It was the immediate feedback. Khan Academy gave her short quizzes after each lesson. If she got a question wrong, it didn’t just show a red X. It showed a hint, then another hint. Sometimes we would sit there and stare at the hint together, trying to reverse-engineer where the mistake was. That wasn’t just teaching her maths; it was teaching her how to look at a problem and see where it broke.
For English, it was a different beast. You can’t just watch a video on how to write an essay and magically understand it. I wanted her to be able to handle the Year 12-level analysis they expected later, but really, she just needed to be able to think structurally. I don’t have a teaching degree, so I felt out of my depth. I found some online sparknotes and closed reading guides, but those felt like cheat codes. They told you the ending of the story in advance, but they didn’t teach you how to watch a story unfold.
Instead, we started doing something simpler. We started reading short stories together, usually by authors like Roald Dahl or even Raymond Carver. We would read one out loud, then I would ask her a dumb question: “What do you think that last line meant?” We would argue about it. Sometimes she would say something I hadn’t even thought of. I realised that the resource wasn’t the study guide; it was the conversation. For English, the resource was me asking a question and then shutting up long enough for her to answer it.
The biology problem was different. That required memorising a bunch of anatomical parts and terms. I scoured for resources that weren’t just flashcard apps. I found a guy on YouTube who did whiteboard animations of the circulatory system, drawing the heart and explaining the flow of blood as he drew. It was crude, but it was visual. She could watch him draw the aorta and then trace the path with her finger. We even made our own diagrams on printer paper, tracing over his stills. It made the messy, complicated system feel manageable, almost like a piece of art. We still have one of those diagrams taped to her wall. It isn’t neat, but it’s accurate.
The biggest resource, though, wasn’t a website or a book. It was time. Specifically, it was the time before school. I work from home, so our mornings became our study time. Instead of trying to fit learning after a full day of school, homework, and after-school activities, we shifted it to the morning. We would wake up at 6:30 and spend forty minutes just going over one small thing. Monday was maths, Wednesday was English, Friday was science. It wasn’t every day, but it was consistent.
That morning shift made a huge difference. Her brain was fresher, and the dread of homework disappeared. The afternoon was free for whatever else she wanted to do. It was a low-friction way to study. It didn’t feel like a punishment. It just felt like a routine. I remember one Monday when she was stuck on a derivations problem and almost threw her pencil. I made her promise we’d stop after ten minutes if she hadn’t gotten it. We stopped, had breakfast, and came back to it the next day. Sometimes stepping away is the best resource you have.
I’m not a tutor. I make mistakes. I’ve Googled things like “Year 12 Biology, medical terminology” more times than I care to admit, and my explanations have not always survived her contact with a classroom textbook. There have been moments where I, with total confidence, explained something in a way that contradicted her school’s teacher. Her teacher knows better than I do, and we had to do a “reset” on a topic. That was humbling, but it was also informative. It reminded me that we aren’t trying to become experts in the subject matter; we’re just trying to build a bridge to the classroom expert.
We’re still in this process. I won’t pretend we’ve “fixed” her academic trajectory. The gaps are closing, but slowly. Some mornings we don’t get to finish everything we planned, and the laundry sits in a pile as we work through a problem about projectile motion. The resources are out there, and they are amazingly good. But the best resource remains the patience to find the right place to start and the discipline to stop when it isn’t working. She’s now looking at Year 10 material feeling less like a visitor and more like a resident. I don’t know if she’ll ever know everything from Year 12, but she knows more than she did last month, and that is enough for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » We were sitting at the kitchen table, and I had just watched my daughter close her maths textbook with a little more force than usual