About James.

Background

That job is the reason he tutors the way he does. Sitting with a class rather than standing in front of one, you notice something quickly: students very rarely get stuck because a topic is too hard. They get stuck because one small thing three chapters back never landed, and everything built on top of it has been wobbling ever since. Most of a good tutoring session is finding that thing.

The subjects help too. Maths, Physics and Computer Science are the exact three that feed an engineering degree, so James isn't teaching them from memory — he's using them, at a harder level, every week. And he sat these exams recently enough to remember what was genuinely confusing about them rather than what a specification says ought to be.

How the sessions actually run

A session is not a lecture. Most of it is you working a problem while James watches, because the useful information is in the working, not the answer — a wrong answer tells you almost nothing, but seeing where a student hesitates tells you exactly what to fix.

So sessions tend to start with a specific thing that went wrong: a question from a past paper, a homework that came back marked down, a topic that has never made sense. From there it's back to whatever the actual root is, and forward again. Sometimes that means the hour looks nothing like the topic you booked it for. That's usually a good sign.

James will also tell you honestly what he thinks. If the problem isn't the subject but the revision method, he'll say that. If he doesn't think tutoring is what you need, he'll say that too — it's a better use of everyone's time than quietly taking the money.