It’s time we showed our appreciation to the few people who actually talk in tutorials

Tutorials are renowned for being unbearably awkward, quiet, and to everyone's dismay, compulsory. No matter how chatty we are outside of the classroom, as soon as we walk into Seminar Room B, it's as though we've never been taught how to speak, and the thought of uttering one word is petrifying and would be massively out of character.

The tension throughout a tutorial could be cut with a knife, and the noise level in the room is so low, that even a whisper feels like a shout when someone actually dares to speak.

Of course, very few actually step up to the mark as far as speaking is concerned, and in most cases it's usually the tutor desperately trying to wring any life out of our hunched over corpses as we flick between Facebook and the reading for the tutorial on our laptop screen.

Along with the tutor, there is always one person who cracks under the immense pressure as a question posed by the tutor is left hanging there stagnantly in the airless room, begging for anyone to answer it in any way whatsoever.

This person is the one we need to thank. This person holds the class together, gives it meaning and gives us the opportunity to coast our way through the session, having the questions asked and answered for us. We are perfectly aware that this person's contributions are ten times more beneficial for them than they are for us, but we happily sit there being spoon fed our 2:1, and it goes down beautifully.

The beautiful thing about the spokesperson in a tutorial is that they are perfectly aware that they are doing everybody else in the room a huge favour, yet this doesn't stop them. They are all-round good people, who are happy to help, and even happier to learn. Many of us will go home that day and moan about 'this dick in the tutorial earlier' because we feel they were showboating their knowledge and making the rest of us look bad.

Quite frankly, we should be grateful that someone uses their confidence in a way that means that the rest of us can sit back and watch time go by as we scroll up and down our newsfeed looking at which unfunny memes our friends have been tagged in that day.

Without the brave few who speak up in our tutorials, most of us would have been worn down by the painful silence we would have had to sit through week on week, whilst we wait for the person next to us to make a contribution. God bless you, contributors.