Max
was expelled from school after he poured eraser fluid down the banisters
of three flights of stairs and set light to it. The flames shot along at
such speed that two boys had slipped in shock, one of which had tumbled and
smashed open his chin on one of the stairs, the wound requiring several stitches.
By the time I started tutoring Max he had been home tutored for nearly a year. He was going a little stir crazy to say the least. His mother, who we will call Catherine, was a middle-aged housewife who seemed to spend most of her time controlling her son's every move. She had managed to wind the kid up so much that he woke up needing to pee several times a night and had over twenty verrucas on his feet.
I was tutoring him A Level History but the boy was not only unable to spell, but had a reading age of someone nearer ten or eleven. He had somehow achieved an A and B in English Lit and Language, which makes me think that students aren't being tested in the appropriate way. The trouble, one again, is the way kids bolster their poor exam performance with coursework that has been written by a crowd equivalent to the script teams on Friends or the like. Indeed, some of their essays have more team construction behind them than Gaudi's unfinished Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. A cathedral of lies and edits from tutors, parents, teachers and online essays. The result is that the kid has deluded his or herself into thinking they are capable of A Level essay subjects. Suddenly they find they have to write an essay a week and don't know how to structure, how to integrate quotes or read material.
Max's favourite way to start a sentence was 'Moreover however the...' Without commas he bulldozed his way through sentences or used run-on sentences that cascaded down the page like a verbal Niagra Falls so that you entirely forgot what it was you were reading about.
We had to go back to basics. This is what a paragraph is. You have one main idea. This is what a topic sentence is. This is how to integrate a quote into a sentence. And so on.
He ended up getting a low B and that was with a lot of coaching. He went on to study History and a foreign language. His grandmother was Spanish and he had got an A at A Level.
Three years later I was teaching a family friend of his and, to my horror, I found out that he was marking SATS papers. I suppose he was using a marking scheme and probably had to do little more than tick off a checklist but, still, I doubt he ever learned to read properly. Last I heard he was intending to go to Dubai or some such place to make lots of money.
