My Daughter Was Good at Maths. Then Grade 10 Happened.

My daughter loved Maths. Not in the way that kids say they love a subject because they are good at it and being good at something feels good — I mean she genuinely enjoyed it. She would sit at the kitchen table and work through problems voluntarily. She would ask questions at dinner about things she had read in her textbook. When she got something right, she wanted to know why it worked, not just that it did.

From Grade 4 through to the end of Grade 9, her results reflected that. She was consistently above 80%. Her teachers spoke highly of her. We had no reason to worry.

Then she moved into Grade 10, and something went wrong.

The Marks Started Dropping — and Nobody Could Explain Why

It was not a dramatic collapse. It never is with these things. It was a slow slide — 78% became 71%, then 64%, then a mid-year result that genuinely alarmed us: 57%. The content was harder, yes. Grade 10 Mathematics is a genuine step up. But this was not a child who was struggling with the content. She still did her homework. She still asked questions. She still got her practice problems right.

She was getting her homework right and failing her tests.

We arranged extra lessons. We bought additional study guides. We sat with her ourselves in the evenings. Her understanding of the material was fine — she could explain quadratic equations to us, walk us through how to find the gradient of a line, demonstrate what completing the square actually meant. The knowledge was there. So why were the marks not following?

We Sat Down With the Papers

The turning point came one Saturday afternoon when I asked her to bring me every marked test and exam paper from the year. I was not looking for anything specific. I just wanted to understand where exactly the marks were going.

What I found was not what I expected.

She was not making errors in the mathematics itself. She was answering the wrong question. Over and over again, across every paper, I could see the same pattern: a question would ask her to determine something, and she would write down only the answer with no working. A question would ask her to prove something, and she would start from both sides simultaneously — which is not how you prove a mathematical statement. A question would say hence, and she would ignore that word entirely and solve the next part from scratch, losing the marks specifically allocated to using the connection between the two parts.

She knew the Maths. She did not know what the question was asking her to do with it.

These Words Have Precise, Specific Meanings — and Nobody Was Teaching Them

When I raised this with her teacher, the response I got was something like: "Yes, learners do struggle with instruction words." And then we moved on.

I went and looked at the curriculum documents myself. The DBE's own NSC Mathematics examination guidelines describe these instruction words explicitly. Calculate and determine require full working — a correct answer with no steps shown earns zero marks on many questions. Prove means you must start from one side and work towards the other; you cannot assume the result you are trying to prove. Hence is a direct instruction: use what you just found, or forfeit the marks. Write down means the opposite — no working required, the answer alone earns the mark.

These are not vague guidelines. They are specific, assessable, and worth real marks in every single exam. A student who misreads "hence" twice in a paper can lose four or five marks. At Grade 10 level, that is the difference between a distinction and a merit, or between a pass and a fail.

And yet, in three years of secondary school Mathematics, my daughter had never been explicitly taught what any of these words meant.

We Could Not Find a Resource That Addressed This Directly

I started looking for something I could give her. A guide. A reference sheet. A website. Anything that explained, clearly and specifically, what NSC instruction words mean and what they require from a student.

There was nothing. Not in the study guides we had bought. Not on the tutoring websites we had visited. There were plenty of resources for learning the mathematics itself — worked examples, practice problems, video explanations. Those are valuable and we used them. But the meta-skill — understanding what the question is actually asking before you attempt to answer it — was nowhere. It was treated as something students would absorb by osmosis, or pick up from their teachers over time, or simply figure out through repeated exam failure.

That is not good enough. Not for the students who are capable, who know the content, and who are losing marks for a reason that could be fixed in an afternoon if someone just explained it clearly.

So We Built the Resource That Did Not Exist

Determine This is what came out of that frustration. It is a single-purpose website with a single goal: teach South African Maths students what every NSC instruction word means, what examiners expect when they use it, and how to recognise it in a question before picking up a pen.

Each instruction word has its own dedicated guide. The guide explains the plain-English meaning, the common mistake students make when they see it, the signal phrases that indicate it is in play, and real past paper examples showing it in context. There is a practice section — not to test Maths ability, but to test whether you can identify what a question is asking before you attempt to solve it.

The site also covers question types within each CAPS topic — the different kinds of problems that appear in Grade 10, 11, and 12 papers, and how to recognise which type you are looking at from the wording alone. Because the other half of the problem my daughter had was not just instruction words — it was that she sometimes did not recognise what kind of question she was being asked. A "nature of the roots" question looks different to a "solve for x" question even though both involve quadratic expressions. If you do not know what type you are dealing with, you do not know which method to reach for.

This Is Not About the Mathematics

I want to be clear about what this site is and what it is not. It is not a replacement for content learning. It will not teach you how to factorise a cubic polynomial or derive the compound interest formula. For that, there are excellent resources — Khan Academy, Maths Genie, past paper sites like testpapers.co.za and saexampapers.co.za. Use them.

What this site teaches is the layer that sits on top of content knowledge: question interpretation. It teaches you to read the question before you answer it, to notice the instruction word and understand what it is requiring, and to check what form your answer needs to take before you start writing.

My daughter spent three years learning Maths. She lost marks for three years because nobody taught her how to read a Maths question. Those are two different things, and the second one matters just as much as the first.

If your child is in the same position she was — capable, working hard, and still watching their marks go the wrong way — start here. The problem might not be the Maths.

Frederick Niekerk is the founder of Determine This and the Information Officer of ShellRick Tech (Pty) Ltd, the company that operates the site.