March 17th

I quit one of my big teaching jobs today and it felt like most productive thing I have done in a long while. When I was working as an actor private tuition was a useful subsidiary income but when you've been out of theatre work for six months, it becomes clear quite quickly, that private tuition can never really provide a satisfying career. Apart from meeting new clients, the work remains pretty much the same. There is also the issue of age. When you are a fresh graduate in his early twenties, A Levels are part of your recent life. You are still able to emotionally connect with the students over the problems, challenges and anxieties of preparing for an exam. As a thirty-year-old, my attitude has changed. I am frustrated by the laziness and lack of initiative amongst many of the students. I am like a band-aid rather than a teacher; there to patch up a gaping wound of inertia inflicted by too much privilege.

I hope to finish tutoring completely by the end of this year, or take it down to a bare minimum of three or fours a week. There. I've said it. I've written it down on a blog on the internet, so now I have to stick to it. I have two students I like and will see through to their final exams. One of them is from a working class background. I would like to throw my energies into helping him more. He is polite and hard working but doesn't read enough. His parents' first language is Spanish and so they have not been able to help him with much of the reading.

Home school kids today were being difficult for the last half an hour. Their energy levels dropped and mine did too if I'm being honest. Not sure that teaching for three hours with a ten minute break isn't asking a bit much of a ten-year-old. Part of the issue is that the girl is much further ahead than the boy and while I set her extra work and more advanced she has a habit of misbehaving to entertain him. I may split them up a bit more. They kept asking if I had a girlfriend. Oh dear, if only they knew. Perhaps they do. 

Coursework corruption

I have touched on this subject already but I want to talk in more detail about coursework cheating at GCSE and A Level.

The way coursework is carried out in most schools allows students ample opportunity to cheat and the unspoken truth is that teachers, parents and tutors turn a blind eye to it and, in some cases, even collude in helping.  

Coursework accounts for somewhere between 20-25 per cent of a student's final grade. In English it will usually involve writing two essays of 2000 words or a piece of creative fiction and commentary in response to a piece of literature. In History it might involve a response to four  different sources about a particular event or person or a written investigation into a historical problem. 

Now the form and level of cheating varies hugely. The students are allowed some general feedback on their first drafts. However, some teachers go much further than this. For example, I was recently working with a student on an essay about Forster's A Passage to India and Where Angels Fear to Tread and I saw the teacher's notes. There were about 6-7 comments per paragraph and in many cases the teacher had offered a rewriting of a sentence. He referred to Italy being a place of 'passionate possibilities' in relation to Edwardian England and yet the student had not made this connection at this point in the essay, referring instead to a character's lust for Italy being attached to a lost classical world. Good point but a different point. OCR states in its marking guidelines that the teacher must 'be able to verify that the work submitted for assessment is the candidate's own work.' I am afraid that some teachers overstep the line and help write a student's essay. I would say that 10-15 per cent of this essay was nothing to do with the student and was instead the teacher's pen at work. 

Of course, many teachers do not collude and maintain good practice but they should not be assessing coursework. They cannot be impartial when they need to achieve certain exam results. Once more, league tables and the whole assessment system skews the work of the teacher. 

Controlled assessment is also a joke. I know lots of students who sneak work into the classrooms, use their phones and talk to one another about how to answer the question. The teachers again turn a blind eye because it is not in their interests to accuse their students of cheating. 

The students who have pushy parents who pay private tutors to write their coursework or write it themselves also contribute massively to the problem. I try to give structural advice or what might be called a writing frame when students work on an essay but when you are there with them for three or four hours at a time the temptation to help them rework sections is high, but I have learned to take a step back. Ultimately you are not there to think for them and you are often long gone when results come out. 

This leads me to the problem of the Internet as a source of chat rooms, essay writing forums and fraudsters willing to make a buck from writing coursework. A little Google search provides several options for students looking for people to write essays for them or download articles and copy or barely reword sections. 

Mori carried out a survey into teacher's attitudes towards coursework back in 2006 and, unsurprisingly, they came out in favour of coursework for the students. Although only 29 per cent said they thought it helped the students build skills for the subject, which is surely one of the main reasons for studying, along with 25 per cent saying that it encouraged independent learning. What was even more discouraging was that only 10 per cent of teachers polled agreed that it motivated students. With such figures it doesn't really add up why teachers think coursework is useful. If it is to be representative of a student's capabilities and a way to develop skills it needs to be part of a more sustained process of assessment. The question is how to build honesty into the system and I think this needs to be tackled in several ways. No coursework outside the classroom. No league tables as it promotes dishonesty. And perhaps students should be marked by candidate numbers and by another teacher in the school or in a sister school so the work is marked with less risk of prejudice. 

The problem with not tackling this is that we are creating generations of students who do not understand how to think independently and as a result they cannot truly articulate their own views. 

The illiterate boy who went on to mark exams.

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.