I am only their gatekeeper.

Every name in this story shaped a science. Mr Pinder shaped me. He taught maths the way it deserves to be taught — with patience, precision, and a contagious belief that every student could understand it if shown the right way.

He is the reason I stand at the front of a classroom today, and the standard I measure myself against every single lesson.

Every equation I write on the board, every concept I unpack — I am passing on what he gave to me.

During high school I didn't know how to study. I worked incredibly hard but I lacked structure, and my grades stayed average. The same thing followed me to university.

In my third year at UWA, I sat my Organic Chemistry major exam and spent three hours staring at a blank page in complete panic. It was traumatic. I lost my organic chemistry major — which is why, to this day, I can only call myself an inorganic chemist. I didn't go back to university for a whole year.

A year later, I pulled myself together and finished an Honours degree in inorganic chemistry. That exam forced me to figure out how to study — properly. I rebuilt the whole process from scratch: understanding over memory, structure over panic, strategy over hours.

Twenty-one years later I did a second degree, in Mathematics and Statistics, by correspondence while working full-time as an industrial chemist. I finished as top student with two excellence awards, a GPA of 6.67 (top 0.1%), and 100% on many exams — not by remembering, but by understanding so deeply I couldn't get it wrong.

That's what I teach. That's all I teach.

I have always felt society is a very odd soap opera. People don't own their lives — they act out a script someone else wrote for them. Same lines, same beats, same costumes. I've never understood it.

My fight against memorising is not just education.

When you are taught to memorise, you are really being trained to participate in the scripted act of life. You are actually losing your identity. You are giving up your right to understand and choose your path. That is not schooling — that is conditioning.

I am terrified students are losing their ability to think. Schools don't have much active teaching on the whiteboard anymore. Students are losing the ability to think and are being encouraged to memorise instead. And now incorrect use of AI has me even more concerned — students are getting dependent on tools like ChatGPT, becoming passive, letting something else do the thinking for them. They are losing the ability to think. That is why I was a strong opponent of AI in the beginning. I watched it hand students answers they had not earned and destroy the very skill they would need most.

I'm a thinker. I'll happily sit and watch the world go by for hours, picking it apart, asking why we do any of this the way we do. Most people find that odd. Funnily enough, the AI doesn't. It just gets on with the conversation.

THINK.

When a student is struggling, I write one word on the board: THINK. They ask me to explain the question. I write it again. THINK. They beg for the answer. I write it again. THINK. And then — every single time — they answer their own question. Because the answer someone gives you is borrowed. The answer you find yourself is owned.

That's exactly what I want for my students. Not another copy of someone else's script. Find out who you are. Forge your own path. Have purpose. Make a difference.

Be true to yourself. The world has enough actors already.

I'm not here to look impressive. I have an inferiority complex — I never think I know enough. That's kept me improving for over a decade. It means I never stop asking how to explain something better, how to help a student see it more clearly, how to close the gap between confused and certain.

I am a humble person. But I am also honest — and the results my students achieve put me among the very best STEM tutors in Australia. That is not opinion. That is what the numbers say. And the main reason for it is simple: I have always been true to myself. I never performed the role of a teacher. I just taught the way I believed it should be done.

The AI isn't pretending to be a tutor. It is how I tutor — built from a decade of sessions with students who target a minimum ATAR of 95, with about half landing at 98 or above and walking into medicine, dentistry, law and engineering at Australia's top universities.