Tutoring for SFU math and physics students

Support for SFU math and physics courses

SFU's term structure leaves very little slack. A first midterm can arrive before a student has really settled into the pace of a course, and once you are behind in a calculus or physics sequence the material keeps arriving whether or not the previous week landed. Most students who contact us are not looking for a rescue at the end of term — they are looking for someone to make this week's problem set make sense so next week does not compound it.

We are independent of the university and claim no affiliation with it. What we provide is patient one-to-one work on the material you are actually being assessed on.

SFU courses we support

Calculus and linear algebra

MATH 150 is Calculus I with Review and MATH 151 is Calculus I; both lead into MATH 152, Calculus II. MATH 154 and MATH 155 are Calculus I and II for the Biological Sciences, and MATH 157 and MATH 158 are Calculus I and II for the Social Sciences. For linear algebra we support MATH 232.

Physics

PHYS 101 and PHYS 102 are Physics for the Life Sciences I and II. PHYS 120 is Mechanics and Modern Physics and PHYS 121 is Optics, Electricity and Magnetism. PHYS 125 and PHYS 126 are Mechanics and Special Relativity, and Electricity, Magnetism and Light.

That list is deliberately limited to courses we can support well. If yours is not on it, ask and we will give you a straight answer.

Where SFU students commonly get stuck

The review course is not a slower course. Students in a calculus course that includes review sometimes expect a gentler term and find instead that the review is compressed into the same weeks as new material. The workload is front-loaded, and the students who cope are the ones who fix algebra gaps in the first fortnight rather than the sixth week.

Applied streams still need the theory. In the biological and social sciences streams, the applications are what get remembered and the underlying technique is what gets tested. Students can interpret a model well and still lose marks on the differentiation or integration inside it.

Calculus II technique overload. The second calculus course throws several integration methods at students in quick succession. Executing any one of them is manageable; choosing between them under time pressure is the actual exam skill, and it needs deliberate mixed practice.

Physics setup, not physics content. In the mechanics courses, most lost marks happen before the algebra: an incomplete free-body diagram, a poor choice of axes, or reaching for kinematics when conservation of energy would have finished the problem in two lines.

Modern physics and relativity feel unmoored. Where a first-year course includes special relativity, students often have no intuition to fall back on. Working carefully through reference frames and what each observer measures is far more effective than memorising the formulas.

How sessions work

Sessions are one-to-one and typically online over Zoom, using an interactive whiteboard so we can both write and so the whole session is visible as it develops. In-person sessions are available across Greater Vancouver. We work from your assignments, lecture notes and practice exams — not from a generic curriculum — and before an exam we shift into timed mixed problem sets so that recognising the question type becomes automatic.

For more on the material itself, see our pages on first-year calculus, first-year physics and linear algebra. We also work with UBC students and with students at any institution, in Canada or abroad.