IB Maths & Physics Tutor for Rome: AA, AI and Physics at HL and SL

American schools and British schools, one Diploma

Three of the IB Diploma schools of Rome are built on the American model. St. Stephen's, on the Aventine, takes students only for grades 9 to 12, day students and boarders, with the American High School Diploma and the IB Diploma available in the last two years. The American Overseas School of Rome, on the Via Cassia, offers AP courses and the IB Diploma under one roof. Marymount, in the Cassia and Vigna Clara area, is American in structure with the Diploma at the end. The other two follow the British route: Rome International School on Monte Mario and St. George's at La Storta take students through Cambridge IGCSE before the Diploma. The consequence for Maths and Physics is concrete. In the American schools a GPA built on continuous assessment runs alongside the IB deadlines, and every quiz lands on the transcript. In the British schools the IGCSE year ends with external exams, and the jump into the Diploma comes right after it.

Two calendars in the American schools

A student in an American-structured school in Rome lives with two clocks. The school year is split into semesters, with a semester grade that goes on the transcript in January and again in June, and that transcript is what US universities read, from grade 9 onwards. On top of it run the IB deadlines: the draft of the Maths exploration, the Physics investigation, the Extended Essay, the mocks. And at AOSR, where AP courses sit next to the Diploma, a student may also have AP exams, which fall in the first half of May, in the same weeks as the IB papers. None of this is hard to manage once it is written down, but it rarely is. The first thing we do is put every date on one page, then decide where the Maths and Physics hours go in each month, so that a quiz in October does not eat the time meant for the exploration and the AP exam does not arrive in the middle of IB revision.

Maths: where Roman students lose the marks

The full AA and AI syllabus, with most of the time on calculus and functions on the non-calculator paper, probability and statistics, and the long questions of Paper 2 and, at Higher Level, Paper 3. For students coming from an American track, the gap is often algebraic fluency at IB pace; for students coming from IGCSE, it is the unfamiliar question that does not look like any past paper. The mathematical exploration is planned early, in the first Diploma year, so that it is not written during the weeks of the mocks.

• Maths AA HL/SL: calculus, functions, algebra, proof
• Maths AI HL/SL: statistics, modelling, calculator technique
• Mathematical exploration: topic, structure, criteria A to E

Physics: rebuilding the ideas that did not land

I am a physicist with a PhD, a former researcher in astroparticle physics. The current syllabus, themes A to E, gets most of the time where the exam takes marks: fields and electromagnetic induction, energy and the particulate nature of matter and, at Higher Level, thermodynamics and quantum physics; data-based questions; and explaining an answer in words, which is where many strong students lose points. The investigation, 20 per cent of the grade, is planned around a research question that the school laboratory can actually answer, with uncertainties handled properly from the first draft.

The north of the city and the hour after school

Most of these schools sit in the north and north west of Rome, along the Cassia and around Monte Mario and La Storta, with St. Stephen's on the Aventine in the centre. Crossing the city at six in the evening for a lesson is an hour lost each way. Online, the lesson starts when school is over, boarders book from campus, and a family that spends the summer abroad keeps the same weekly slot.

Predicted grades are decided at school

Most IB students in Rome apply to universities in the UK, the Netherlands or on English-taught courses in Italy, and students in the American schools often add US applications on transcript and GPA. All of those offers hang on predicted grades and on marks already in the file, written months before May. So the calendar that matters is your school's mock calendar, and the plan is built backwards from it.