24 hour lesson

At 12 pm on 9th December 2006 25 year 12's and 13's met at St Andrew's to take part in a sponsored 24 hour lesson in aid of Education Action International. Here's what we got up to...!

To start the day we had a guest speaker on why we were there and issues in the world. the one fact i remember form that was that 110,000,000 people around the world are out of education. the around of money Americans spend on ice cream every year could solve this! its quite ironic as we had ice cream for afters that evening!

Then we had a bit of a physics lesson where me made our very own things! and i call them things cos we couldn’t decide on what they are called! its them buzzer toys, but our had a light instead.

We then spent some time in the hall pretending it was a slum in Calcutta and that we were families who made paper bags for a living. In half an hour my group managed to make 70 bags which we sold for 7 rupees, if this was reality our family would have just about survived.

We then tried out our buzzy things to see what our reaction time was like when we weren't tired. (can you see me in the back of the pic?) We carried on testing every few hours throughout the night to see what happened, most people's times decreased. But my groups didn’t!

We then played a few kiddy games in the hall, was very fun! will have to teach some of the games for club! we then went upstairs to watch half of high school the musical. a very good film, but extremely cheesy!

this was followed by salsa dancing! very traumatizing! me and Ellie were partners and being the tallest she decided she would play the male role. however there was a male 6th former who was on their own, and the only person left to pair up was my male RE teacher. so the lady picked on a two female pair to split up, and guess who she picked- me and Ellie! so i ended up salsa dancing with my 6ft 4 teacher! i don’t have a picture of the actual thing but here is a reenactment that took place the next morning...


this followed with a midnight feast- curtsey of Waitrose!

This followed with dinner, and a few more games, bonfire going back upstairs to watch the test of high school musical. We then had a lesson on French Hip-Hop which was very boring as i could not actually understand the teacher- he was French! This followed by a discussion on politics, during this time we passed the half way mark, and were very happy about it!

at 1.15am we then started to watch Charlie and the chocolate factory in a shall we say an original way! We sang and danced with all of the songs, and did lots of games to do with chocolate and sweets during the film.... I’ve been put off chocolate!

the film finished at around 4.15am and we went 'stargazing' in the playground. All we could really see were all of the lights on in the Channel 4 building. To get rid of some energy from all the crap we had been eating we had to do a silent conga around the playground and down into the gym where we played even more kiddy playground games.

after this we had a lengthy 'welcome to the dawn service', which included standing round a bombfire with a candle each, then going back into the chapel where us tied teenagers had to sing hymes in another language. very dangerous, as went start to drift of to sleep you are at major risk of putting you head into the candle flame and dropping it on the floor.

by the time this was over it was light outside and two English teachers cooked us breakfast. the smell alone made me feel really sick! i couldn’t believe it but excessive chocolate really had put me off food! it was great to be back out in fresh air and in daylight... Mr. Dane had lots of fun..


This followed by even more games! this time they were very different, including passing a spoon around stating 'this is a spoon' 'a what' 'a spoon', when in actual fact we were passing around fork- every exciting i know! the second game included saying 'hi harry' 'yes harry' 'tell harry', then anyone who messed it up had to pretend to be noddy and it all became complicate from there on!

we then had a lesson where we had to read the Sunday papers and discuss the articles. At the end we had to make ourselves some hats! from here we went straight to drama! where everyone was too tied to even try and act!

to draw the 24 hours to an end we had a final talk from out head of year, followed by my favorite part, which involved composing a song about our experiences. Click here to watch a video if it (stolen form someone’s myspace). this followed by my old English teachers two little kids and her husband who led us in the final part- singing 'my favorite things' from the sound of music. was so lovely and a perfect end!

The best part was no one went to sleep! And I only needed two red bulls out of the 5 I took with me, expecting it wouldn’t be enough! Thanks to everyone who gave donations!