{Currently offering holiday discount} PhD Candidate in English Literature, based in London and available remotely, works with you to make the most out of your undergrad or postgrad dissertation

Find out more about Alex

• 1) When did you develop an interest in your chosen field and in private tutoring?

  Like so many, my relationship with literature was ignited by a school teacher. Mine was Mr Kidd. His breadth of knowledge taught me that books could be about more than stories, that they could be about ideas, too.
  
  I remember struggling through the Lord of the Rings books, because my dad, trying to instil a love of literature in me, insisted that I read the books before he would take me to the cinema to see the films come out. I was distraught, because I was finding them such a slog; these were meant to be great books, revered by clever people, so why were they so boring? Surely that meant I wasn't one of these clever people?
  
  In despair I confided in Mr Kidd and, to my surprise, he grinned: it was a good sign, he told me, that I was finding them boring. Because they were boring. It meant that I knew how to think for myself, and knew what I liked to read. That meant that I was actually engaging with the books, not just letting them wash over me.
  
  That moment contains a lot of what I bring to the study of literature, and to tutoring. The reason that those books didn't interest me was because the ideas in them didn't resonate - and the tortured prose didn't make things any better. That's just me, though: for many, these books are like sacred texts. It's about finding out what resonates and what doesn't, and following fruitful paths through reading and learning.

• 2) Tell us more about the subject you teach, the topics you like to discuss with students (and possibly those you like a little less).

  I teach two subjects, really. The first is English Literature, and the second is more simply Writing.
  
  The joy of English Lit is in pattern recognition and joining dots. It's about thinking about how this book connects to other books, how sentences within the book connect to others, how a writer's work connects to the broader corpus and to the time in which it was written.
  
  These are the processes which motivate me when teaching English Literature: finding new ways to think about books, especially those which have been studied amply before. I find that with each cohort of schoolkids and degree students, there are new ways of thinking, because the context from which thinking is happening has shifted. Nothing stays the same, there are a host of new reference points.
  
  If there is anything that I dislike about teaching literature, it's how teaching can occasionally stymie that instinct to connect books to the moment in which they are written. The teaching of literature can become rote: as the same books are taught for a decade in the same way, the reference points become outdated. This means that the texts no longer connect to students, and it's my job to help them reconnect so that they can understand the texts on an intuitive level, not just by remembering the details.
  
  Writing is different, a far more technical process. I used to think that writing came naturally to me, but during the advanced stages of my academic career I have learned more about the techniques which make writing sing. I found that I was using many of them already, without knowing it. But I found out about many more which have improved my writing no end.
  
  Good writing practice goes beyond the end product, though. I find it most fulfilling when approaching a piece of work through the lens of good writing practice actually changes the way the writer thinks about the subject. It can force a degree of critical rigour to think about proper argumentative writing, and allows us to cut through to the story which animates the work. It allows the writer to take possession of that which they're creating, and grant the permission to feel like a writer, rather than a student.

• 3) Did you have any role models; a teacher that inspired you?

  I've already talked about my English teacher at school, so I'll talk about a different one now: a lecturer at the university where I completed my Masters Degree.
  
  His lectures weren't for everyone: they were sort of an onslaught of ideas, concepts and abstractions, making reference to all sorts of historical events and assuming a lot of knowledge on the part of his students. Some found this barrage to be overwhelming, and at times it was. But it made me feel respected, as though I was on his level. I wasn't, I was far from it, but it allowed me to feel as though I was party to a knowledge ecosystem which I could dip my feet into. There was no way I was going to understand everything that he said, but I felt as though I was dipping my toe into a dauntingly vast lake. If I lived for two hundred years I would get nowhere near understanding everything there is to know. A bracing and humbling sensation, but an exciting one. I knew I would never be bored.

• 4) What do you think are the qualities required to be a good tutor?

  Respect for the student is paramount. What I've been getting towards is the idea that in many ways students already know what they think about a text, or they already know what they want to say. Respecting that means not trying to change what they think, but giving them the confidence and knowledge required to say it. In English Literature, only very rarely is a feeling or an idea invalid, sometimes it just needs the scaffolding or a tweak in its architecture.
  
  Sometimes this requires patience, another crucial quality - but it comes automatically with respect. It doesn't take any patience to simply tell a student that they're wrong, or what they don't already know. It takes patience to guide them to the idea themselves, so that they feel like they have ownership over it. This isn't just a fluffy philosophy, it's practical. Ownership of an idea stops the knowledge being dusty and ephemeral, and therefore quickly forgotten. It's so easy to forget a fact that someone tells you in a class; ideas that you have yourself are hard to forget.

• 5) Provide a valuable anecdote related to your subject or your days at school.

  I'm going to relate this to a previous anecdote, about JRR Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings. And I've given a couple of anecdotes of my own, so let's give one about him.
  
  Many have speculated about the significance of The Two Towers, which gave the name to the second book in Tolkien's trilogy. What does the twinness of the towers represent? The battle between light and dark? The diffuseness of evil? The divided psyche of the nation?
  
  When Tolkien was writing the book, his window overlooked a crematorium, protruding from the top of which were two chimney stacks. Whether this somehow seeped into his subconscious and inflected the fantasy world he was creating, or whether he looked at them one day and thought, "That'll do," is beside the point. The point is that any of the answers I've proposed above can be right if there is sufficient evidence to support them. The most interesting readings come from how the reader relates to the text at the moment.

• 6) What were the difficulties or challenges you faced or still facing in your subject?

  There is so much to know which will never be known. Decades ago now, in the early 00s, a very clever person worked out that it would take one hundred years to read all of the books published in English in just that year. Since then, with the surge in popularity of e-readers and online publishing, books have been published at an exponential rate.
  
  Confronting this fact is difficult, especially when the pursuit of knowledge is at the heart of an academic career. But it's necessary.

• 7) Do you have a particular passion? Is it teaching in general or an element of the subject or something completely different?

  My own passion is literature which seeks to make the world a better place, and working out how precisely that can happen. By the world, I don't mean the whole world, I mean the limited world around the person who has read the book: how does that translate into action, or behavioural changes? We all hear about books which have made the reader "a better person" - but what exactly does that look like?

• 8) What makes you a Superprof (besides answering these interview questions :-P) ?

  I'm open to learning from my students. Each one of my students teaches me something I can pass on to the next. Sometimes I work with Masters and PhD students on elements of their writing. They can teach me about subject areas I'm not native in - I've learned about machine learning, art markets in Africa, and environmental policy, and much more. I love jumping into a new subject as a novice, and quickly learning as much as I can.
  
  But it's not just the experts that have something to teach. Recently I had a student doing his English Literature GCSE on King Lear. The perpetual wonder of literature is that Shakespeare remains relevant, and he taught me why. Lear still made sense to him, on an instinctual level. The themes are written and rewritten. He said, "So this is a bit like in House of the Dragon when…" "Huh," I thought. It was exactly like that.
  
  It comes back to respect, really. By approaching each one of my lessons like there is an opportunity for me to learn something too means that I begin each one excited, ready to work together with the student. Maybe together we'll think something that nobody's ever thought before.