As an IT professional for much of my career, the patience required to coax a user into letting go of the controls and letting me actually help them, is a delicate thing; but like: "please, you called me for help, let me help you." (I do not think I ever actually said that, so much as thought it, a lot).

Wasting our collective time with them in the "driver's" seat continuing to flail while I stand beside exasperated when they should probably go back to a class if they want the delicate treatment? They never paid me well enough for that.

Still, the results could be hilarious at times!

I'll never forget the time when someone at a previous employer came up to the IT area to ask for help in how to use the scanner. He showed me a bunch of documents he had printed out: they were all screen shots.

I showed him how, in the future, he could use "print screen" functionality and simply save a screen shot/frame buffer to a file electronically, rather than wasting paper and then scanning it back in for a digital copy.

The users: I have fought for them! Sometimes, I wonder why. It seems as if they need less fighting and more fundamentals. ;)

But yeah, if you're in a school? Let the students suffer through the hard stuff with guidance, make them better users, please. Exasperated IT folks, ultimately, really want our users to become self sufficient.

I had already leveled up to being invited to Co-SysOp in my teens and I have been toiling in the realms of libre/free open source software for so long, that to me: if you are using a computer, and can't compile code from source: what are you even doing with a computer?! There is so much stupendous source code, just out there, waiting for folks to utilize it, and instead too many are wasting too much money paying big corporations for binaries that stink.