Did you take your gcse or A Level 2 years early? Or both? If it’s the A Level 2 years early, that’s why I’m not particularly a fan of pushing students on to it an early age - clearly didn’t work out very well for you. Whereas if you’d have done it at the correct time you’d have almost certainly done much better. And perhaps would have continued on with maths. Did you even like maths p?
I once taught a student that had come in to year 7 with an A* in gcse maths. We didn’t push him straight on to A Level for this reason.
well i did everything a year early 'cause of skipping a grade (if anything i think i would've benefited hugely from skipping another, but i digress) so maybe that doesn't mean much. on top of that, those of us who got level 8 in the year 9 SATs were put in an express group for GCSE. this worked ok for me as i got an A despite that being the height of my lazy shit phase, but then we did the AS in year 11 and that's when i hit the wall. i failed (or got an E, anyway), dropped into the normal AS level set in year 12 and repeated it, did better but still not great. i'm not sure doing it early was the problem honestly, pretty sure it's just a leap i don't have the brain for. it always felt to me that there was a difference in kind as well as degree, like A Level maths not only required more thought but a different kind of thinking that i wasn't really capable of. maybe more memory-based and less and less reliant on the pure arithmetic at which i was prodigiously talented?
i mean, i think if i was given 5 years and took it really slow i could get an A in it or something, so you're right in a way, but an extra year wasn't enough. i found A Level maths was kind of like a house of cards: each layer is built on the previous, and if you miss out a layer or are too slow to build it fully before moving to the next one, you're kind of fucked for the whole year unless you can catch up. that's how i felt a lot of the time, like the reason others were excelling was because the basics of the course had become second nature to them, whereas i just wasn't retaining the formulas and whatnot quickly enough.
i should also point out that my interest had really started to shift into the arts at that point, i became way more interested in literacy-based subjects than numeracy, and i've always had a problem retaining information that doesn't interest me. this is probably bullshit but i sometimes wonder if 12 year old me would've been better at A Level maths than 15-17 year old me was, as ludicrous as that sounds. i loved maths back then. anyway, in A Level i liked and was generally good at statistics, struggled with pure and fucking hated mechanics, if that tells you anything lol
funnily enough, this process repeated itself at university: i did foundational logic and aced it, was the best in my class, so i decided to do advanced logic and almost totally flunked it, it dragged my average down by several points and was the sole reason i didn't get a first in my degree.
