Tutoring

Heinrich Boll's What's to Become of the Boy: Or, Something to Do With Books is back in print, or at least back on the shelves at stores I frequent. It is worth reading in general, but I was struck by what he said of a brother's tutoring technique:

not long before, my brother Alfred had cured me of this [strange German math] trauma by systematically and patiently "probing back" to my basic knowledge, discovering gaps, closing them, and thus giving me a firm foundation.

There is an American blogger who has said something like this: if your child is not getting math level x, you need to find out whether he has understood levels x - 1 ... 1.