I broke one of the unwritten rules about maths teaching yesterday. Never however much you are tempted contact those people who said they you get back to you, but did not. It is usually because they have not got the results they wanted, and do not want to tell you about it....
 The trouble is then that you can live in a bubble of good results. It is the ones you never hear about you have also to worry about. And I do ( I reckon, from experience, around haf of them are merely inertia on the part of the pupil - they would tell you but....and the other half are those who have not done it).
 The problem of course is that one so wants to make a difference - of course one does - but sometimes it is not possible. The case result in point, was was a weird one-  the pupil had a genius in plausibly being wrong. I mean he was so plausible in not noticing something, or starting from the wrong place, and so generated such plausible readings, that he would catch me out: I would find myself agreeing within him, and only them say No.
The problem was therefore very clearly one of reading  and thinking about the questions for his actauly theoretical maths was rather good. He  misread questions, wanting them to be harder or just different from how they were, and all else followed. The problem then is of course exactly how does one address those who misread in this way? A real teaching problem, and one as unique as the pupil. What one then does is of course ones best. One goes through questions, one teaches lessons to the way they read must be read, one talks about putting distance in between them and the thought, and talks about reflexivity, and the joy of self correction, and does so repeatedly. One talks about the power of reading a question carefully, but also how to read bearing in mind the examiner, and the nature of a questions themselves... Finally one gives them lots a really difficult papers, and trues to get them to think under stress in a way that will get through an exam.
 All of which can work - but with a plausible misheaded thinker it is always touch and go. For they might help, but they do not tackle the real problem. That problem is that the pupils has just mistook the nature of maths. They are thinking of it too abstractly  just at the moment when you need to think of it as a problem-solving enterprise. This means they are quite literally reading it wrong. - they are if you like actually mistaking the nature of Number in the context of a maths exam.  What makes the problem tricky is that the pupil is not wrong. Maths can be abstract, it is just not in GCSE! or to put it better translating something into maths, into the abstract world of symbols is only half the problem. One also has to translate abstract maths into actual questions, and make sure then you meet up.
  It is this the inspired reader could not do - and I could not seem to show him how to do. He got the point that he was reading wrong, and that it was something to do with the way he was thinking about the maths, but could not stop, could not change - and so got a B not an A. Not awful, but he would have got a B without me... A good reminder to me as a teacher than sometimes it does not work, and one has to keep on learning how to teach, and thinking about how to make sure that next time...
 For the pupil? well the grade did not stop him doing what he wanted to do,and he has time to go back to it if he wants to it. Moreover it does happen that only a bolt from beyond, a result cocked up, can give the impetus to really rethink how one thinks (which is never easy). Maybe he needed that result. If he did then the structures I went through with him of how to use maths to think, in terms of questions should help.
  So in the end nothing is lost but parental hope and the dignity that goes iwith it. But perhaps that is not as bad as that to loose.