Sun streams in through the windows. I would open them, but I can’t reach them on account of the fixed computer benches, three feet wide, that run around three sides of the room including under the windows. I have propped open the outside door with the fire extinguisher, and the inside one with a broken computer chair. A little sultry breeze comes in, laden with the smell of cut grass, diesel fumes, and the distant sound of sheep complaining as they are moved through the footbath.

Seated in the hot room are nineteen young Modern Apprentices, some studying agriculture, but most of them engineering. The room smells of hair, sweaty palms, slightly oily denim, last night’s aftershave, and long-dead footwear; but at least, these days, there is no pervasive undertone of dirty face cloths. The showers in the College hostels are clearly becoming more popular than baths or a lick-and-a-promise.

I am teaching these lads to word process, and they are working through a Heinemann book of exercises meant to prepare them to take the Computer Literacy and Information Technology test.

They are not happy.

I know the thoughts running through their heads; I have heard them spoken at the start of each term’s course for the last three years. “Word Processing? That’s just texting isn’t it miss, except it’s with a keyboard. We know all that, Aki’s the fastest, so do we have to? Can you turn on predictive? Can we use the Internet? Can we put pictures in?”

I have been explaining that when they cut and paste text in order to move a sentence according to the instructions, they must move the full stop as well.

“Miss, why’s there a space next, and why can’t I use a comma so I won’t need a capital letter?”

I explain that there are no spaces before punctuation, just one space after it, and that there is always a full stop at the end of a sentence.

“Miss, what’s a sentence?”

Oh God.

Someone will always spot an exception to the no-spaces rule, like the opening bracket. Someone else will have been taught by a trained touch typist and insist on three spaces after a full stop, a la Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce. I explain that RSA. now known as OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA) have emerged out of the horsedrawn age to run CLAIT. Its new goalposts for Word Processing now demand a maximum of two spaces, and for Desktop Publishing, only one, so three spaces will get one of my red marks, which on the day of the test will count towards their penalties for going wrong.

Know-it-all subsides, grumbling. The others glaze over. They struggle on through the piece on the Aztecs, which forces them to find X and Z on the keyboard. When one day Paxman demands on University Challenge, “Which city was founded on the site of Tenochtitlan?” all my CLAIT students will shout “Mexico City.” At least they would if they weren’t up the pub.  

I wrote some new exercises for these students, because the four in the book were not enough practice to prepare them for the test. When I presented the agrics with a piece on drovers moving stock in the Auction Mart, they said, “Who wrote this stuff anyway?”

“The National Farmers’ Union Secretary,” I said.

“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” they sniffed, with automatically scorn.

“SHE is a burly bloke called Mike, her dad’s a farmer, and she’s visited more auction marts than you’ve had hot dinners.”

“Miss! my spell checker says wellies isn’t a word.”

“Right-click it and add it to your dictionary.”

“You told us not to do that last week.”

I tell them not to do a lot of things, but it doesn’t usually stick. I give them rules, such as not putting a dash right up against a word – nor spaces either side of a hyphen – but presentation is as foreign a concept to them as flower arranging.

“What’s a dash, is it that line thingy miss? It shouldn’t be so like that hy- what you said, should it? Sticking together AND keeping apart, that’s confusing that is. Give Tommo superglue instead of easing oil and see how he gets on.”

“MISS! Why can’t I get those up in the air commas that go round talk? It’s printing twos.”

“You’ve got Caps Lock on. Use Shift instead.”

“Our teacher said to use Caps Lock for capital letters. Why doesn’t it work for the up in the air commas?”

“Caps Lock only works on the keys that have just one letter on them. What you want are double quotation marks and look, there’s a two on the same key. Use Shift and you’ll get the marks.” God save me from their ICT teachers whose specialism seems to have been woodwork.

Apostrophe troubles I would sympathise with. Barely one in five of my colleagues is really confident with the up in the air comma. Luckily these lads only have to copy what’s on the page, and apostrophes don’t feature strongly in the snappy little numbers describing Earthquakes (find the Q) and the Richter scale, the Aztecs and human sacrifice, the Demented Drovers and their wellies, and my attempt to charm the engineers, Smoky Diesels and engine maintenance. The only regular apostrophe is, “Bloody computers!” Delete delete delete. Or in the case of those with woodwork teachers, right-arrow-right-arrow-right-arrow-backspace-backspace-backspace.

It’s not that they don’t want to use computers, but they only want to know them as parts department catalogues, or Play Stations or X-boxes. I think some of them suspect what is true: that this is a session designed to gain funding from the Further Education Funding Council. Bums-on-seats in a CLAIT class spell money in the College coffers.

The bums themselves would rather be outside in the big airy workshops, sneaking a crafty drag by the back doors.

“MISS! the computer’s eating my writing!”

“Did you hit INSERT?”

“It isn’t inserting, it’s eating my letters.”

“It’s overtyping them, that’s all.”

“I didn’t tell it to do that.”

“You must have hit it by mistake. Look, it’s right next to Delete.”

“Bloody silly place to put it.”

He’s dead right.