Study Tips and Tricks for Grade 10 (2024)

Grade 10 is an important transition year. You are required to do fewer subjects but the workload and difficulty of the subjects that you keep often increases. Sometimes, students who have done well in grade 8 and 9 struggle in grade 10 due to the increased difficulty. Many students cannot rely on their natural ability anymore and are forced to put in some hard work outside of the classroom in order to maintain their marks.

Grade topics /syllabus

Syllabi can generally be found online. The syllabus is a very useful tool to avoid nasty surprises on the day of an exam. However, when it comes to exam content in grade 10 your teacher is always the best person to ask. Often there will be subtle differences in an exam that are dependent on the teacher setting the exam.

An important point on the grade 10 syllabus is that most schools begin teaching trigonometry at this stage. Trig will play a large roll down the line in the paper 2 for matric finals. It is very important to understand the basics of trig in grade 10 because it will be very difficult to understand it come matric. Particularly with all the other pressures that are present in matric.

Tips and tricks

Master the Key Concepts

What I struggle with the most when studying maths (at any level) is persuading myself that I have an understanding of a concept after only doing some examples on it. This is not the case. This is an easy trap to fall into. Do not try to memorise the processes. This is counter-productive. It is much better and rewarding in the long-run to focus on understanding the process and logic that is involved. This will help you understand how you should approach such problems in the future.

Remember that Maths is a sequential subject so it’s important to have a firm understanding of the key concepts that underpin a mathematical topic before moving on to work on other, more complex solutions which are based on understanding the basics. This is particularly important for sections such as general algebra and trig where a firm foundation and understanding is highly important.

Understand your Doubts

Sometimes you can get stuck trying to solve part of a maths problem and find it difficult to move on to the next stage. It’s common for many students to skip this question and continue on to the next. You should avoid doing this and instead spend time trying to understand the process of solving the problem. If you are finding it impossible and beating your head against a wall I find particularly helpful to do one of the following things:

• Find similar problems. This will help to reinforce the processes behind it and will give you a better understanding of the problem at hand.
• Ask your teacher to go through that particular problem. Teachers can be incredibly helpful if you reach out to them.
• Ask a friend. It might take some courage to admit that you do not understand something but it is definitely worth it in the end

Once you have grasped an understanding of the initial problem, you can use this as a stepping stone to progress to the remainder of the question and more difficult questions with ease.

Review Errors

It often takes a lot of courage to try and find where you have gone wrong. It is very easy to leave what is in the past in the past and not look at it again, or to have the attitude that they have asked those questions already and will therefore not likely ask them again

When you’re practising with these problems, it’s important to work through the process for each solution. If you have made any mistakes, you should review them and understand where your problem-solving skills let you down. Understanding how you approached the problem and where you went wrong is a great way of becoming stronger and avoiding the same mistakes in the future.

Study methods for maths

Practice, Practice & More Practice

Maths can often be very intimidating and not understanding concepts can be pretty scary. Often there is a nasty part of you that believes that it is impossible to understand a certain concept. This is not the case – however you will never understand if you do not practise.

It is impossible to study maths properly by just reading and listening. To study maths you have to roll up your sleeves and actually solve some problems. The more you practice answering maths problems, the better. Each problem has its own characteristics and it’s important to have solved it in numerous ways before tackling the exam. There is no escaping this reality, to do well in a Maths exam you need to have solved a LOT of mathematical problems beforehand.

Resources

So in order to do all of this practice, it is important to have resources that allow you to be challenged. These resources can come from a number of locations:

• Textbooks – textbooks allow you to do a huge number of questions on one particular topic.
• Worked examples – this doesn’t really fall under the category of practice, but what helps a lot is to attempt a worked example without looking at the answer and then check the working to see where you went wrong.
• Past papers – these are very available if you look for them. Often teachers can give them out but might not for some reason. It is then up to you to find some. Maye ask older students for their old tests.

Suggested free resources

Khan Academy

https://www.khanacademy.org/math

Khan Academy is a non-profit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Khan academy has helped me out of tricky situations for a number of subjects. It is a particularly good resource for worked examples and explanations.