I only teach one lesson on Thursdays now my year 12s have finished. The group I teach are very low ability year 9 students. Normally we do a bit of work, go on the Internet and generally keep quiet and calm. These kids aren’t going to be IT specialists, the closest they’ll come to using IT is probably working an automated system in a factory, or the CO2 machine in a garage. They have problems with abstract concepts (spreadsheets make them very confused) but real things they can get their hands on and mess with make sense (they’re quite good at making posters, or finding things on the Internet).

Today’s lesson was about manual handing. I teach in the Library for this lesson, and today the IT technicians had received a large delivery of computers and monitors. They all needed shifting into a store room out the way. Guess what we did for half an hour.

“Right kids, these boxes go into the room down the corridor”.

And they were off! Not a single moan or complaint, in fact at the end they asked if there was anything else they could move around. I have other classes that if we tried that they’d tell us to F-off and refuse. I let them have the remainder of the lesson free on the Internet as a reward.

I have no idea how, but with groups like that I need to somehow incorporate more moving around to keep them occupied.

The boxes weren’t heavy or overly large, they only contained TFT monitors and super slimline PCs. It’s not like they were carting 19″ CRTs or full-tower cases around, before you worry