Marked in red

I have taught English privately since 2015, and I keep the exercise books of the students who finish, because they forget them and because I like seeing the beginning afterwards.

Otoniel's book has thirty-one lessons in it. Tuesdays, half seven to half eight, at his flat, at the kitchen table, for a year and two months.

He was forty-four and he needed English because his company had been bought by an American group and the meetings had switched over without anybody asking anybody anything.

I mark in red. Everybody marks in red. What changes from teacher to teacher is what you decide to mark.

An adult gets things wrong differently from a teenager. A teenager gets it wrong from not knowing. An adult gets it wrong because they learned it wrong in 1996 and then spent thirty years practising the mistake with confidence, and dismantling that is half the job.

The other half is deciding what to let through. If I marked everything, nobody would say a word out loud, and a student who does not speak never learns any language at all.

Lesson 4. Present simple. Homework: five sentences about your routine.

"I wake up at six. I take coffee. I work all day. I come back at eight. I watch TV alone."

Red on two: take coffee becomes have coffee, because in English you do not take it. And I circled alone and wrote in the margin, "fine, but careful: it reads as sad in English."

He read the margin at the next lesson, laughed, and said that was the intention.

I wrote in my own planning book: "good vocabulary, poor pronunciation, high motivation."

Lesson 11. Past continuous. Homework: what were you doing at ten last night?

"I was thinking about the class of tomorrow."

Red on one: the class of tomorrow becomes tomorrow's lesson.

I did not correct the rest because there was no rest. The homework asked for five sentences and he handed in one.

In the margin I wrote "4 missing".

About the geography of it, which nobody thinks about with private lessons.

His kitchen table was a metre twenty across. At a table that size, teacher and student sit on the corner, at ninety degrees, because facing each other means neither of you can read the same page.

Ninety degrees means one person's knee points at the other. For an hour. Fifty-two times a year, if nobody cancels.

We used the same book, open between us, and I wrote over what he had written. To do that I had to reach. For him to follow, he had to lean in.

That is the lesson. That is exactly the lesson, and it is like that with every student, and in ten years I had never once thought about it.

Lesson 19. Present perfect. Homework: five things you have never done.

"I have never been to Europe. I have never eaten oyster. I have never learned to swim. I have never told my wife the truth about 2019. I have never wanted a class to not finish."

Red on two: oyster becomes oysters, and to not finish becomes not to end.

The other three were grammatically correct.

I wrote nothing in the margin on that page, which is also a choice, and a choice the student notices.

The following week we did modal verbs for fifty minutes with a rigour that was not called for.

Lesson 23. Conditionals. Homework: complete using if.

He handed in the sheet with five sentences and the fifth was scratched out, gone over in blue biro until it could not be read, and rewritten underneath as "If it rains on Tuesday, I will call you."

That one is correct and there was nothing for me to mark.

It rained that Tuesday. He did not call, I went, and the lesson happened as normal.

Lesson 26.

There is no homework recorded for lesson 26.

The page is blank with the date at the top in my handwriting, because I write the date at the start of every lesson before anything else.

His kitchen has a granite worktop to the left of the table, sixty centimetres deep, and two tall cupboards whose doors sit slightly open because the hinge on one of them has been loose since before I started teaching there.

The red pen stayed on top of the open book, on the blank page, from twenty to eight until nine.

I left at ten past nine and the book stayed there, because the book is his.

Lessons 27 to 30. Passive voice, reported speech, phrasal verbs, revision.

Four normal lessons, homework done, red marks averaging three a page. I have a record of all of it and I have no margin notes at all in those four.

He went to Chicago in August and came back saying he had understood seventy per cent of the meetings, which is very good and is more than most people manage in fourteen months.

That was the objective reason we stopped. He did not need it any more.

Lesson 31. The last one. Open homework: write whatever you like, half a page.

He wrote twelve lines about the trip, the hotel, the August cold that is not cold, and a meeting in which he spoke on his own for four minutes and nobody asked him to repeat himself.

There are seven errors in those twelve lines. I marked all seven.

The last sentence on the page is: "I am not sorry about the class 26."

It should be lesson 26, with no article, because in English you do not say the class 26. I know that, he knew it by lesson 4, and it is the kind of error I fix with one stroke and three letters.

That one went without any red at all.