Tutoring in Toxteth
I was twenty-three years old, and had just begun a PhD in the Mathematics Department of Liverpool University. The year was 1994. I was living with my girlfriend at the time, in the attic flat of our landlord’s large family home in South Liverpool, in an old Victorian estate by the Mersey. Each day I would make the journey by bus into the university.
The departmental secretary had taken a call requesting a mathematics tutor, and had passed on the request to the postgraduate students in the department. I wrote down the number and said I would call. The name was Ken. It was the first time I had ever offered myself as a private tutor. I have only a faint recollection of the phone conversation. All I remember is that he haggled me down to what in retrospect was a very low price: fifteen pounds for two hours, each week, with his nine-year-old stepson. I remembering feeling wrong footed, and slightly out of my depth, being totally unused to any sort of negotiation. However, having agreed the price, I felt bound by it.
I was to deliver the tuition at the family home, which was only a few minutes walk from the department, in a part of the city called Toxteth. It was a famously poor area, in a city with a huge unemployment rate, somewhere close to half the adult population at the time. Ken was a Rastafarian – well at least he was from Jamaica and had long dreadlocks. His accent, to my ear, was a mix of West Indian and Cockney. His old silver Mercedes was parked in the driveway of a semi-detached house, and he met me outside. I shook his hand and asked if it was his car. He treated me to a lecture on the fact that quality cars last a long time and how cheaply an old Mercedes could be bought. The he led me into the house.
The boy was there. Ken began another spiel, this time about how he had taken this boy and his brother under his wing, and had undertaken to make sure the two of them were properly educated.
“I realised,” he said, “that this boy is a genius.” He gestured to the small boy who was standing quietly in front of us.
Ken was genuinely convinced that the boy was a prodigy. To demonstrate this, before we had sat down, he made him recite an essay which he, Ken, had written, entitled “My Views on Yob Culture.” ‘Yob Culture’ was a favoured phrase of the Prime Minister at the time, John Major, who had used it in a speech on the causes of crime and antisocial behaviour in society. The boy stood with his hands behind his back, toe pointed into the carpet, twisting one leg, while he recited the essay from memory, his eyes on the skirting board. Ken pushed the original copy, written in biro’d capitals on lined paper, into my hands, so I could check that the recitation was word-for-word. I cannot remember anything about the essay except that its first sentence began with the same words as the title, and that it was what I considered to be generic populist conservative law-and-order rhetoric, the kind of thing you might read in the Daily Mail. Indeed, Ken turned out to be a social conservative, in favour of corporal punishment, for example, and locking petty offenders up for a long time , a paid-up member of the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade.
He explained to me that he had gone as far as he could in teaching the boy himself. He had imparted what he knew, and now wanted to pass the task on to someone with more specialist knowledge. This was my job. At first he tried to sit in on the lessons, but his constant interruptions forced me to ask that he remove himself. Mercifully, he did. I was then able to gauge the boy’s ability and the level of mathematics to which he was accustomed. He could do basic arithmetic very well. He had not seen long multiplication, so I decided that I would teach him this first. I actually had no idea what a nine-year-old should be able to do, according to the primary school syllabus. However, he seemed bright and very eager to learn. He took to what I taught him with talent and worked hard. I enjoyed teaching him, and I think we made some progress.
At some point during the first of these sessions, the mother returned home with her older son. She was a fat, pale Scouse woman with a grating voice. She breezed in and was a little over-effusively welcoming, before retreating to the kitchen. When I was leaving, she lectured me on why I should never have children.
“My life is ruined,” she said. “I’ve got no life now, because of these two. They’re nothing but trouble.” Ken escorted me on my way out to the street, explaining that the woman was an alcoholic and was incapable of looking after her children, and that he had to take care of everything. I walked, bemused, back to the university mathematics building.
Over the next three months I continued to visit the house. After a few sessions, Ken requested that I also tutor the other child. Again, my negotiating skill was inadequate, and Ken demonstrated his neat footwork. Somehow I agreed to tutor the two boys together for the first hour, then the nine-year-old alone for the second, all for the same price. The older boy, fourteen years old, had been expelled from several schools already and was in a special school for ungovernable children. His mother gave me a long explanation about how he had suffered some sort of head injury, and since then had been impossible to control, but that that the compensation money was very useful. Ken confided, separately, that she was drinking the compensation money, and the reason for the kid’s bad behaviour was that he was mixed race.
“You should never mix the races. Those kids are never any good,” he said. I told him I disagreed with him. He took this calmly. I did not point out that Ken himself appeared to be in a relationship with a white woman.
One thing I will say for Ken, he never took offense when I disagreed with him, which I did politely but often, on subjects varying from astrology to crime and punishment. These conversations were always good-humoured, in contrast to the bullying to which he subjected his stepsons. He treated me as a naïve idealist and patiently explained that I would know the truth in time, meanwhile agreeing to disagree. When he tried to guess my star sign and failed, he became very excited when I told him I was a Scorpio.
“Of course! Scorpio!” he said
“But I don’t believe in astrology,” I said.
“Of course you don’t, you’re a Scorpio.” There is not much you can say to that.
During some of the first few lessons with the two brothers together, Ken sat in again. This time things were worse. My tutoring style is to constantly involve the pupils by asking question after question and making them do exercises repeatedly at every turn. I never prepared the lessons but became expert at making up simple maths problems on the spot. I am patient but persistent in getting an answer, prodding and giving clues but always trying to force the pupil into thinking. Ken constantly disrupted this process. As soon as there was any hesitation from the older boy, he would explode with temper, yelling out “Come on, five by six! That’s not right!” He would rock back and forward in the chair, hitting his legs and huffing. Of course this rendered thinking impossible for any of us. The last straw came when, having moved on to teaching the solution of equations, and still being in the habit of making up problems on the spot, one of the answers turned out to be a negative number. By this time I had got the boys familiar and comfortable with negatives, but when this happened, Ken shouted in his Jamaican brogue, “Impassible! You cannat take thee greater fram thee lesser!” I put it to him that in a bank account, you can , and indeed people often do. This seemed to convince him.
“Yes, well in a bank account, that’s true,” he agreed quietly. I insisted again that I be left alone with the children to teach.
The fourteen-year-old turned out to be very eager to please, and to me seemed enormously good-natured. He would try very hard to answer any question I gave him. His knowledge of arithmetic was somewhere behind that of this brother, but not by much. His problem was not a lack of talent – he certainly had the ability to do the work I set – but simple hastiness. He was so keen to get the right answer, and to impress me, that he rushed at it. I had to slow him down. I don’t think I actually ever told him to take a breath, but a large part of my work with him was simply getting him to approach a problem calmly. I had some success as long as Ken was out of the room.
I also asked him privately about his behaviour problems. I asked him why he kept getting expelled from schools.
“Fighting,” he said.
“Why do you fight?”
“I don’t know. The boys call me names.”
I had no idea how to probe any further into this, but as he was so well-behaved with me, I simply carried on teaching him whatever mathematics I could.
Ken was a bully of course, but I don’t believe he was violent, despite his views. The mother was different. I remember sitting with the younger boy in one of our sessions, when she started screaming at his brother in the kitchen. “You’re useless! A waste of space!” As the screaming got louder, I looked at the nine-year-old next to me, who was studiously ignoring the uproar and concentrating on the problem I had set him.
“Is this bothering you?” I said, nodding towards the kitchen door.
“No,” he said, and carried on with the work. There were a couple of loud slaps from the kitchen – one, making me start and wince, then a pause, and then another. I stopped talking and listened. It had gone quiet. It appeared the fight was over.
The end came when I was awarded a grant to spend three months at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, which was running a programme in my field that year. I explained this to Ken and the boys.
“Three months,” I remember one of them saying, making it sound like an eternity. In fact I never visited the house again. When I returned from America, Ken never called back, and I made no effort to reestablish the sessions. It was too difficult. I felt guilty but relieved to be out of it. I carried on with my research, and took on other pupils at easier, richer households for more money.
Two or three years later I met the younger boy, by then in early adolescence, playing outdoors with a friend. I said hello and shook his hand, asking him if he was doing well at school, and how his maths was going.
“Alright,” he said.
I told him to work hard and keep out of trouble, and went on my way, feeling like a hypocrite and a fool.
Christopher Taylor
November 2007
