Four things I do differently, and why.

Your child does the math. I don't do it for them.

Across 225 studies, students who worked problems in class scored about half a letter grade higher than students who were lectured at. Failure rates under lecturing ran 55% higher.

"The best way to study math is to study math. Do math problems, get a math lesson, then do more math problems."

A hard session is a good session.

Students who struggle through problems learn more and think they learned less. A clean explanation feels like understanding. It usually isn't.

"It's okay to get that wrong. The whole point of this is to learn."

Problems get mixed, and they come back later.

Drilling one topic twenty times in a row is the easiest way to look ready and not be. Mixing topics, and returning to a skill days later, gets better retention out of the same number of problems.

A practice test only works once.

Once your child has seen a test, they remember it, and the next score comes out higher than the truth. There are only 16 official tests and the College Board isn't making more, so there are only 16 honest scores available. I space them out so there's always a real one left to check where your child actually stands, and I write my own worksheets for everything in between.

Sources: Freeman et al., PNAS 2014. Deslauriers et al., PNAS 2019. Rohrer, The Effects of Spacing and Mixing Practice Problems.