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. 

F**k the mothers by all means...

This was a memorable piece of advice I received on my first of two training days at a London tutorial agency...

‘Fuck the mothers by all means but don’t touch the kids.’

The head of the tutoring company, who I will refer to as Charles, spoke to us while sitting on a table in an airless conference room somewhere in South Kensington. There were about thirty of us in there, staring back at him. Like prawns in tap shoes, we were unformed and stupid but willing to do anything to secure a teaching contract.  

‘You’ll find it much easier if you can flirt with the mothers. They’re usually the one responsible for hiring you and they're usually the one who will write out the cheque. A little flirting might be the difference between them recommending you to their friends or not.’

Charles had been educated at public school and carried that natural confidence that is the hallmark of such an education. He spoke almost entirely through anecdotes, which I soon came to learn, is the currency teachers use in socialising and competing with one another. He talked of VIP clients, the bratty offspring of C-grade celebs and even about the daughter of an MP who used to throw chairs at her tutor, although he was careful to name no names.

He was one of those men who spent all of his time talking to the women in the group and barely glanced at us men. I suppose you get to a certain age and level of success that you don’t have to worry about hiding your lust for younger women. Still, he wasn’t attractive. Not so much a silver fox as a grey manatee. He clearly liked long boozy lunches and walked around in a permanent third trimester of steak and ale pies.

After talking at us for about an hour, Charles set us a task. He drew three match box houses together on a whiteboard and said we had to work out the formula for the number of matches needed to build however many houses you required. Now let me make it clear at this point that I wanted to tutor History and English and this looked distinctly like Maths.

‘But here’s the tricky bit. I want you to teach the problem as if you were teaching a twelve-year-old,’ Charles added.

I was thinking that bit wouldn’t be so hard. All I had to do was imagine I was talking to myself.

We had to team up with a partner and I found myself working with some girl, whose name might have been Glandular, Angela or Angina. She had the worst set of teeth I had seen on anyone in a long while. I'm not sure if it’s just bad genes or that the upper middle class simply don’t think their teeth matter, but she’s not the first case of posh girl with bad teeth I’ve seen. Being partnered to an American, I have found the cliche about the poor quality of English people’s teeth to be largely true. Our mouths are generally like the Somme. Most of my friends haven’t been to a dentist in over a year and some even longer. I think something like a quarter of all deaths in the medieval and early modern period were in some way linked to tooth disease. That’s the bit they didn’t show you in Shakespeare in Love: Paltrow leaves Shakespeare, moves to the New World and dies of tooth decay.

Anyway, Angina and I were about to tackle our little algebra problem when this old fellow puts up his hand. Now most of the tutoring candidates were Oxbridge graduates, but there were a couple of older, established teachers, who had come along in the hope of a bit of extra income.

‘Yes?’ Charles said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Tanner,’ the man replied. Mr Paul Tanner.’

James Bond he was not.

‘Mr Tanner. What’s the problem?’

‘Well, I’m an English teacher. I have been for thirty-five years. I hope you’re not expecting me to teach Maths.’

‘We sometimes find it useful that our tutors can help out with other subjects. This is GCSE Maths here, nothing complicated,’ Charles answered.

‘I hope you’re not expecting the Maths tutors here to chip in with the English because I think that would be a bloody cheek.’

We all shifted in our seats. Charles looked at the man with that confident, don’t fuck with me, rugger-bugger face.

‘Well, don’t feel you have to participate Mr Tanner.’

We all knew that was the end of Mr Tanner’s hopes of any tutoring work. Mr Tanner knew it too. He got up from his seat, gathered his things and made for the door, stopping just long enough to help himself to a couple of slices of cake which had had been laid on for free with tea and coffee.

The rest of us turned our attention back to the Maths problem and, to my surprise, bad-toothed Anaemia was pretty good at algebra and came up with a solution. 

The rest of the day was spent roleplaying, which I loved, but it did very little to tackle the problems I later faced when tutoring. Other than the advice that we shouldn’t touch the children up, the other thing I remember from that first day, was an older female teacher, who warned me in no uncertain terms that I should do this for one year and one year only. 

‘If you’re still here in a year, you’ll be here in five. It’s the same with teaching in a school. It’s a vocation, whether you admit it or not. If you want to do something else, then now is the time to start thinking about it.’

She had that haggard look of someone who had been at the coalface for years. Someone who had lost their ambition. It turned out she wanted to be a writer too. She wanted to write a historical romance novel set in the French Revolution and all I could think about was that meant she wanted to do Les Miserables. However, she was right about getting stuck. I tutored because I thought it was easy and it was easy a lot of the time. Far easier than teaching in a school where you have the politics, paper work and gallons of children pouring through your classrooms every day. But, as a thirty-year-old I have come to understand that tutoring is a kind of half-life, twilight place or vegetative state in which time has been lost. I can try and justify these last seven years by the few good acts, by pretending that I have brought a little socialism into the lives of students who have investment bankers for progenitors but there remains a sense that it is I who have been fucked up by the mothers, manipulated into helping many of the students to obtain grades they do not deserve. I would go as far to say that most private school A grades are actually B or C grades that have been massaged by the collaboration and collusion of teachers, parents and tutors.